Fixed income strategies based on the prediction of parameters in the NS model for the Spanish public debt market

Using different econometric models, Diebold and Li (J Econom 130:337-364, 2006) addressed the practical problem of forecasting the yield curve by predicting the factors level, slope and curvature in the Nelson-Siegel framework. This paper has two main aims: on the one hand, to investigate the predictive possibilities of the yield curve for the Spanish public debt market, using the methodology proposed by Diebold and Li (J Econom 130:337-364, 2006); and on the other hand, to study the capability of generating profits by transforming these yield curve predictions into technical trading strategies. The Sharpe ratios of our strategies outperform the hedging strategy benchmarks for long (1 year) horizons in our prediction period (2000 - 2010) and also for the current crisis period (2008 - 2010).Nevertheless, these strategies do not outperform their benchmarks for short (1 month) horizons. The introduction of nonparametric models improves the profitability of the strategies in terms of the Sharpe ratio, especially in the 1-year-ahead predictions. This finding is in line with Diebold and Li (J Econom 130:337-364, 2006), whose forecasts for long horizons are much more accurate than those of several standard benchmark models

U.S. monetary policy and herding: Evidence from commodity markets

This paper investigates the presence of herding behavior across a spectrum of commodities (i.e., agricultural, energy, precious metals, and metals) futures prices obtained from Datastream. The main novelty of this study is, for the first time in the literature, the explicit investigation of the role of deviations of U.S. monetary policy decisions from a standard Taylor-type monetary rule, in driving herding behavior with respect to commodity futures prices, spanning the period 1990-2017. The results document that the commodity markets are characterized by herding, while such herding behavior is not only driven by U.S. monetary policy decisions, but also such decisions exert asymmetric effects this behavior. An additional novelty of the results is that they document that herding is stronger in discretionary monetary policy regimes.N/

Inflation targeting and term premia estimates for Latin America

Inflation targeting has been widely adopted in Latin America. In this paper, we show evidence consistent with major beneficial effects from so doing, with falling term premia and anchored policy rate expectations. To do this we construct term premia estimates using the method suggested by Adrian et al. (2013) for selected inflation targeting Latin American economies. They use synthetic prices constructed from estimated yield curves to derive holding-period excess returns and condition on the principal components of the yields. This approach is extremely easy to implement and fast to calculate. We detect a small drop in interest rate expectations since the global financial crisis but longer term rates seem remarkably well anchored. There is also relatively low correlation between our estimated Latin American and US term premia

Using Housing Futures in Mortgage Research

Expectations of housing prices play an important role in real estate research. Despite their importance, obtaining a reasonable proxy for such expectations is a challenge. The existing literature on mortgage research either does not include housing expectation proxies in empirical models, or uses “backward-looking” proxies such as past housing appreciation or time series forecasts based on past housing appreciation. This paper proposes to use the transaction prices of Case-Shiller housing futures as an alternative “forwardlooking” proxy. As an example, we compare the performances of four different expectation proxies in explaining mortgage default behavior. The loan level analysis shows that the futures based expectation proxy outperforms other proxies by having the highest regression model fit and being the only proxy that shows a significant negative effect on mortgage default behavior, as theory suggests. Out of sample predictions also show that futures have better prediction accuracy than other proxies. In addition, the paper shows that futures contain additional information that is not present in the backwardlooking proxies