Harry Mamaysky

Interest Rates and the Durability of Consumption Goods

In this article I study an economy with irreversible durable investment and investors who consume a durable and a nondurable good. In a general equilibrium setting, these assumptions lead to endogenous variation in the implied risk aversion of investors and in the term structure of interest rates. In the model, the magnitude of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution places certain restrictions on the joint dynamical behavior of durable consumption, nondurable consumption, and the yield curve. Tests of the model using postwar U.S. data are supportive of these restrictions. However, while the model is able to generate a relatively large term spr

The Time Horizon of Price Responses to Quantitative Easing

Studies of how quantitative easing (QE) impacts asset prices typically look for effects in one- or two-day windows around QE announcements. This methodology underestimates the impact of QE on asset classes whose responses happen outside of this short time frame. We document that QE announcements by the Fed, ECB, and the Bank of England are associated with: quick price reactions of medium- and long-term government bonds; but with reactions in equity and equity implied volatility that occur over several weeks. Robustness checks using past monetary policy episodes and the cross-section of US industry returns confirm these results.

How News and its Context Drive Risk and Returns Around the World

We develop a classification methodology for the context and content of news articles to predict risk and return in stock markets in 51 developed and emerging economies. A parsimonious summary of news, including topic-specific sentiment, frequency, and unusualness (entropy) of word flow, predicts future country-level returns, volatilities, and drawdowns. Economic and statistical significance are high and larger for year-ahead than monthly predictions. The effect of news measures on market outcomes differs by country type and over time. News stories about emerging markets contain more incremental information. Out-of-sample testing confirms the economic value of our approach for forecasting country-level market outcomes.