How Deviations from FOMC's Monetary Policy Decisions from a Benchmark Policy Rule Affect Bank Profitability: Evidence from U.S. Banks

Purpose: This paper aims to provide fresh empirical evidence on how Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) monetary policy decisions from a benchmark monetary policy rule affect the profitability of US banking institutions. Design/methodology/approach: It thereby provides a link between the literature on central bank monetary policy implementation through monetary rules and banks’ profitability. It uses a novel data set from 11,894 US banks, spanning the period 1990 to 2013. Findings: The empirical findings show that deviations of FOMC monetary policy decisions from a number of benchmark linear and non-linear monetary (Taylor type) rules exert a negative and statistically significant impact on banks’ profitability. Originality/value: The results are expected to have substantial implications for the capacity of banking institutions to more readily interpret monetary policy information and accordingly to reshape and hedge their lending behaviour. This would make the monetary policy decision process less noisy and, thus, enhance their capability to attach the correct weight to this information

Predicting Aggregate and State-Level US House Price Volatility: The Role of Sentiment

This paper examines the predictive ability of housing-related sentiment on housing market volatility for 50 states, District of Columbia, and the aggregate US economy, based on quarterly data covering 1975:3 and 2017:3. Given that existing studies have already shown housing sentiment to predict movements in aggregate and state-level housing returns, we use a k-th order causality-in-quantiles test for our purpose, since this methodology allows us to test for predictability for both housing returns and volatility simultaneously. In addition, this test being a data-driven approach accommodates the existing nonlinearity (as detected by formal tests) between volatility and sentiment, besides providing causality over the entire conditional distribution of (returns and) volatility. Our results show that barring 5 states (Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, and Nebraska), housing sentiment is observed to predict volatility barring the extreme ends of the conditional distribution. As far as returns are concerned, except for California, predictability is observed for all of the remaining 51 cases

Macro Explanatory Factors of Turkish Tourism Companies' Stock Returns

This study examines whether the stock prices of Turkish tourism companies respond to growth in eight macro-economic variables namely, consumer price index, imports, exchange rate, consumer confidence index, oil price, money supply, foreign tourist arrivals, and monthly stock market return. By applying the Granger causality procedure, we find that growth in the consumer confidence index and imports could Granger cause tourism companies’ stock returns among eight macro factors in Turkey during the 2005 to 2013 period. After considering the structural break that occurred in 2007, the pre-break results indicate that the consumer confidence index, exchange rate, and foreign tourist arrivals could Granger cause tourism stock returns. However, the results in the post-structural break period reveal that only growths in oil prices and imports are significant

Strategic asset allocation and intertemporal hedging demands: with commodities as an asset class

This paper analyzes the role of commodities in the process of strategic asset allocation, with an attempt of computing the weight of commodities relative to traditional assets in a multi-period portfolio choice problem and understanding the economic interpretations to its importance. We find U.S. investors have a significantly stable intertemporal hedging demand for commodities in the long horizons, even when they have access to foreign equity markets, for example, foreign stock market. Our results provide support to institutional investors attempting to include commodities into their strategic asset allocation decision

Strategic asset allocation and intertemporal hedging demands: with commodities as an asset class

This paper analyzes the role of commodities in the process of strategic asset allocation, with an attempt of computing the weight of commodities relative to traditional assets in a multi-period portfolio choice problem and understanding the economic interpretations to its importance. We find U.S. investors have a significantly stable intertemporal hedging demand for commodities in the long horizons, even when they have access to foreign equity markets, for example, foreign stock market. Our results provide support to institutional investors attempting to include commodities into their strategic asset allocation decision

Decoding the Australian electricity market: new evidence from three-regime hidden semi-Markov model

The hidden semi-Markov model (HSMM) is more flexible than the hidden Markov model (HMM). As an extension of the HMM, the sojourn time distribution in the HSMM can be explicitly specified by any distribution, either nonparametric or parametric, facilitating the modelling for the stylised features of electricity prices, such as the short-lived spike and the time-varying mean. By using a three-regime HSMM, this paper investigates the hidden regimes in five Australian States (Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania), spanning the period from June 8, 2008 to July 3, 2016. Based on the estimation results, we find evidence that the three hidden regimes correspond to a low-price regime, a high-price regime, and a spike regime. Running the decoding algorithm, the analysis systemically finds the timing of the three regimes, and thus, we link the empirical results to the policy changes in the Australian National Electricity Market. We further discuss the contributing factors for the different characteristics of the Australian electricity markets at the state-level

The effect of tourism investment on tourism development and CO2 emissions:Empirical evidence from the EU nations

The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of tourism investment on tourism development and CO2 emissions in a panel of 28 EU countries using annual data from 1990-2013. The empirical results from a panel cointegration test confirm the presence of long-run equilibrium relationship among the variables. The long-run elasticities indicate that tourism investment has a significant positive and negative impact on tourism development and CO2 emissions, respectively. Finally, the short-run heterogeneous panel non-causality test results show the evidence of bidirectional causality between tourism investment and tourism revenue. These results therefore suggest that tourism investments not only increase tourism revenue but also reduce CO2 emissions. Given these findings, we suggest the policy makers of the EU nations to initiate more effective policies to increase the tourism investments. The increasing tourism investments will allow the industry to grow further by ensuring sustainable tourism development across the EU member countries

Risk aversion and Bitcoin returns in extreme quantiles

We study whether level of risk aversion can be used to predict Bitcoin returns using copulas and quantile-based models. We find evidence of predictability when the market return is at extreme quantiles. Further analyses show that the cross-quantilogram is similar when risk aversion is at the low or medium level for various quantiles of Bitcoin returns. The predictability is positive when the risk aversion is at very low level. However, predictability becomes negative when both the risk aversion and Bitcoin returns are very high, suggesting that when risk aversion and Bitcoin returns are at very high levels, Bitcoin is less likely to have large gains.http://www.accessecon.com/pubs/eb/default.aspx?am2022Economic