Brent Bundick

Endogenous Volatility at the Zero Lower Bound: Implications for Stabilization Policy

At the zero lower bound, the central banks inability to offset shocks endogenously generates volatility. In this setting, an increase in uncertainty about future shocks causes significant contractions in the economy and may lead to non-existence of an equilibrium. The form of the monetary policy rule is crucial for avoiding catastrophic outcomes. State-contingent optimal monetary and fiscal policies can attenuate this endogenous volatility by stabilizing the distribution of future outcomes. Fluctuations in uncertainty and the zero lower bound help our model match the unconditional and stochastic volatility in the recent macroeconomic data.

Do Federal Funds Futures Need Adjustment for Excess Returns? A State-Dependent Approach

This paper utilizes a Markov-switching framework to model excess returns in federal funds futures contracts. This framework identifies a high-volatility state where excess returns are large, positive, and volatile and a low-volatility state where excess returns have a lower volatility and are small in absolute value. Federal funds futures rates require adjustment for excess returns only in the high-volatility state. Intermeeting rate cuts of the federal funds rate target always correspond with the high-volatility regime and can explain much of the variation in excess returns. This paper also examines previous return models and helps clarify the relationship between excess returns, business cycles, and intermeeting rate cuts. In real-time forecasting, however, the unadjusted futures rates outperform three different forecasting models. This result strengthens the case for unadjusted futures rates as a measure of monetary policy expectations.

The Dynamic Effects of Forward Guidance Shocks

We examine the macroeconomic effects of forward guidance shocks at the zero lower bound. Empirically, we identify forward guidance shocks using unexpected changes in futures contracts around monetary policy announcements. We then embed these policy shocks into a standard vector autoregression to trace out their macroeconomic implications. Forward guidance shocks that lower expected future policy rates lead to significant increases in economic activity and inflation. After examining forward guidance shocks in the data, we show that a standard model of nominal price rigidity can reproduce our empirical findings. To estimate our theoretical model, we generate a model-implied futures curve which closely links our model with the data. Our results suggest no disconnect between the empirical effects of forward guidance shocks and the predictions from a simple theoretical model.

Uncertainty Shocks in a Model of Effective Demand: Reply

de Groot, Richter, and Throckmorton (2018) argue that the model in Basu and Bundick (2017) can match the empirical evidence only because the model assumes an asymptote in the economy’s response to an uncertainty shock. In this Reply, we provide new results showing that our model’s ability to match the data does not rely either on assuming preferences that imply an asymptote nor on a particular value of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution. We demonstrate that shifting to preferences that are not vulnerable to the Comment’s critique does not change our previous conclusions about the propagation of uncertainty shocks to macroeconomic outcomes. JEL Classification: E32, E52

Forward Guidance, Monetary Policy Uncertainty, and the Term Premium

We examine the macroeconomic and term-premia implications of monetary policy uncertainty shocks. Using Eurodollar options, we employ the VIX methodology to measure implied volatility about future short-term interest rates at various horizons. We identify monetary policy uncertainty shocks using the unexpected changes in this term structure of implied volatility around monetary policy announcements. {{p}} Two principal components succinctly characterize these changes around policy announcements, which have the interpretation as shocks to the level and slope of the term structure of implied interest rate volatility. We find that an unexpected decline in the slope of implied volatility lowers term premia in longer-term bond yields and leads to higher economic activity and inflation. {{p}} Our results suggest that forward guidance about future monetary policy can materially affect bond market term premia, even without large-scale asset purchases.

Performance assessment of real-time estimation of continuous-time stochastic volatility of financial data on GPUs

Real-time Bayes estimation of stochastic volatility for financial ultra-high frequency data is plagued with the curse of high dimensionality. Methods have been developed to manage this problem through the use a parallel computing, relying on supercomputing and GPU resources. In the technical paper, we endeavor to assess the performance of GPU computing and show that an adequately equipped GPU workstation can rise to the task, producing reasonably real-time results with actual data from financial markets.