Meredith J. Beechey

A closer look at the sensitivity puzzle: the sensitivity of expected future short rates and term premia to macroeconomic news

Nominal forward rates are sensitive at surprisingly long horizons to macroeconomic news and monetary-policy surprises. This paper takes advantage of affine term-structure modelling to demonstrate that movements in term premia, not expected future short rates, account for most of the reaction of forward rates at long horizons. Specifically, term premia account for about three quarters of the reaction of nominal forward rates 10 to 15 years hence to the surprise component of numerous macroeconomic news announcements. This has strong implications for the interpretation of interest-rate sensitivity. Contrary to some recent conjectures, long-horizon expectations of the level of inflation and real rates appear reasonably well anchored in the United States, but the associated term premia are quite variable.

The Rise and Fall of U.S. Inflation Persistence

This paper estimates the path of inflation persistence in the United States over the last 50 years and draws implications about the evolution of the Federal Reserves monetary-policy preferences. Standard models of central-bank optimization predict persistent inflation outcomes. Time variation of the central banks preference for output stability should be reflected in changes in inflation persistence. We estimate an ARMA(1,q) model with a time-varying autoregressive parameter for monthly U.S. inflation data from 1955 to 2006. The coefficients provide an estimate of the inflation target and the path of inflation persistence. The estimated inflation target over the sample is approximately 2.8 percent and we find that inflation persistence declined substantially during Volcker and Greenspans tenures to a level significantly less than one and significantly below that of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Excess Sensitivity and Volatility of Long Interest Rates: The Role of Limited Information in Bond Markets

Asymmetric information between the central bank and bond markets creates an inference problem that affects the behaviour of long interest rates. This paper employs a simple macroeconomic model with a time-varying infation target to illustrate the implications of asymmetry for the sensitivity of long rates and volatility of bond returns. When the central banks infation target is not communicated and macroeconomic shocks are imperfectly observed, bond markets infer the value of the target from noisy signals. This heightens the sensitivity of long-run infation expectations to transitory shocks, thereby raising the measured reaction of long rates to monetary policy and to infation surprises. Calibrated coe±cients from such regressions are more than twice as large when bond markets lack knowledge of the target compared with a full information scenario. Time variation in the infation target is the main source of volatility, but learning adds to the ability of the model to explain the observed volatility of returns along the yield curve.

A Bayesian Vector Autoregressive Model with Informative Steady-State Priors for the Australian Economy

This article applies a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with informative steady-state priors to a parsimonious model of the Australian economy. The model captures economic linkages among key Australian and US variables and is estimated on quarterly data from 1985 to 2006. An out-of-sample forecast exercise shows that the model with informative steady-state priors generally outperforms a traditional Bayesian vector autoregressive model as well as naive forecasts. The model can also be used to generate density forecasts and analyse alternative scenarios, which we illustrate with the effect on the Australian economy of a substantial real depreciation of the US dollar.

Policy Interest-Rate Expectations in Sweden: A Forecast Evaluation

In this article, we evaluate two types of Swedish policy interest-rate expectations: survey expectations and expectations inferred from market pricing. The data are drawn from the most prominent survey of financial-market economists and from Swedish financial markets, and they are carefully matched by date to ensure comparability. Results show that both kinds of expectations suffer from bias and inefficiency, and in terms of forecast precision there is no clear winner. We do find, though, evidence that the forecast accuracy of both kinds of policy-rate expectations has improved since the Riksbank started publishing its own policy-rate forecast, suggesting that this communication strategy has been beneficial from a policy perspective.

Rounding and the impact of news: a simple test of market rationality

Certain prominent scheduled macroeconomic news releases contain a rounded number on the first page of the release that is widely cited by newswires and the press and a more precise number in the text of the release. The whole release comes out at once. We propose a simple test of whether markets are paying attention to the rounded or unrounded numbers by studying the high-frequency market reaction to such news announcements. In the case of inflation releases, we find evidence that markets systematically ignore some of the information in the unrounded number. This is most pronounced for core CPI, a prominent release for which the rounding in the headline number is large relative to the information content of the release.