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Does economic policy uncertainty affect household stockholding? To answer this question we create a novel measure of household exposure to economic policy uncertainty news by combining survey information on the hours a household spends in reading newspapers and the frequency of such news in the popular press during a household’s pre-interview period. After controlling for household fixed effects, month-year fixed effects and time-varying cognitive skills, we find that households with a higher exposure to economic policy uncertainty news are less likely to invest in stocks held directly or through mutual funds. This effect is independent from the market volatility index and household (first-moment) expectations about the stock market index.
The paper illustrates based on an example the importance of consistency between the empirical measurement and the concept of variables in estimated macroeconomic models. Since standard New Keynesian models do not account for demographic trends and sectoral shifts, the authors proposes adjusting hours worked per capita used to estimate such models accordingly to enhance the consistency between the data and the model. Without this adjustment, low frequency shifts in hours lead to unreasonable trends in the output gap, caused by the close link between hours and the output gap in such models.
The retirement wave of baby boomers, for example, lowers U.S. aggregate hours per capita, which leads to erroneous permanently negative output gap estimates following the Great Recession. After correcting hours for changes in the age composition, the estimated output gap closes gradually instead following the years after the Great Recession.
The authors relax the standard assumption in the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) literature that exogenous processes are governed by AR(1) processes and estimate ARMA (p,q) orders and parameters of exogenous processes. Methodologically, they contribute to the Bayesian DSGE literature by using Reversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) to sample from the unknown ARMA orders and their associated parameter spaces of varying dimensions.
In estimating the technology process in the neoclassical growth model using post war US GDP data, they cast considerable doubt on the standard AR(1) assumption in favor of higher order processes. They find that the posterior concentrates density on hump-shaped impulse responses for all endogenous variables, consistent with alternative empirical estimates and the rigidities behind many richer structural models. Sampling from noninvertible MA representations, a negative response of hours to a positive technology shock is contained within the posterior credible set. While the posterior contains significant uncertainty regarding the exact order, the results are insensitive to the choice of data filter; this contrasts with the authors’ ARMA estimates of GDP itself, which vary significantly depending on the choice of HP or first difference filter.
This paper revisits the macroeconomic effects of the large-scale asset purchase programmes launched by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England from 2008. Using a Bayesian VAR, we investigate the macroeconomic impact of shocks to asset purchase announcements and assess changes in their effectiveness based on subsample analysis. The results suggest that the early asset purchase programmes had significant positive macroeconomic effects, while those of the subsequent ones were weaker and in part not significantly different from zero. The reduced effectiveness seems to reflect in part better anticipation of asset purchase programmes over time, since we find significant positive macroeconomic effects when we consider shocks to survey expectations of the Federal Reserve’s last asset purchase programme. Finally, in all estimations we find a significant and persistent positive impact of asset purchase shocks on stock prices.
We use minutes from 17,000 financial advisory sessions and corresponding client portfolio data to study how active client involvement affects advisor recommendations and portfolio outcomes. We find that advisors confronted with acquiescent clients stick to their standards and recommend expensive but well diversified mutual fund portfolios. However, if clients take an active role in the meetings, advisors deviate markedly from their standards, resulting in poorer portfolio diversification and lower Sharpe ratios. Our findings that advisors cater to client requests parallel the phenomenon of doctors prescribing antibiotics to insistent patients even if inappropriate, and imply that pandering diminishes the quality of advice.
We assess the relationship between finance and growth over the period 1980-2014. We estimate a cross-country growth regression for 48 countries during 20 periods of 15 years starting in 1980 (to 1995) and ending in 1999 (to 2014). We use OLS and IV estimations and we find that: 1) overall financial development had a positive effect on economic growth during all periods of our sample, i.e., we confirm that from 1980 to 2014 financial services provided by the various financial systems were significant (to various degrees) for firm creation, industrial expansion and economic growth; but that, 2) the structure of financial markets was particularly relevant for economic growth until the financial crisis; while 3) the structure of the banking sector played a major role since; and finally that, 4) the legal system is the primary determinant of the effectiveness of the overall financial system in facilitating innovation and growth in (almost) all of our sample period. Hence, overall our results suggest that the relationship between finance and growth matters but also that it varies over time in strength and in sector origination.
JEL Classification: O16, G16, G20.
A tale of one exchange and two order books : effects of fragmentation in the absence of competition
(2018)
Exchanges nowadays routinely operate multiple, almost identically structured limit order markets for the same security. We study the effects of such fragmentation on market performance using a dynamic model where agents trade strategically across two identically-organized limit order books. We show that fragmented markets, in equilibrium, offer higher welfare to intermediaries at the expense of investors with intrinsic trading motives, and lower liquidity than consolidated markets. Consistent with our theory, we document improvements in liquidity and lower profits for liquidity providers when Euronext, in 2009, consolidated its order ow for stocks traded across two country-specific and identically-organized order books into a single order book. Our results suggest that competition in market design, not fragmentation, drives previously documented improvements in market quality when new trading venues emerge; in the absence of such competition, market fragmentation is harmful.
This paper investigates how biases in macroeconomic forecasts are associated with economic surprises and market responses across asset classes around US data announcements. We find that the skewness of the distribution of economic forecasts is a strong predictor of economic surprises, suggesting that forecasters behave strategically (rational bias) and possess private information. Our results also show that consensus forecasts of US macroeconomic releases embed anchoring. Under these conditions, both economic surprises and the returns of assets that are sensitive to macroeconomic conditions are predictable. Our findings indicate that local equities and bond markets are more predictable than foreign markets, currencies and commodities. Economic surprises are found to link to asset returns very distinctively through the stages of the economic cycle, whereas they strongly depend on economic releases being inflation- or growth-related. Yet, when forecasters fail to correctly forecast the direction of economic surprises, regret becomes a relevant cognitive bias to explain asset price responses. We find that the behavioral and rational biases encountered in US economic forecasting also exists in Continental Europe, the United Kingdom and Japan, albeit, to a lesser extent.
SAFE Newsletter : 2018, Q4
(2018)