Reaction of Swiss Term Premia to Monetary Policy Surprises

An affine yield curve model is estimated on daily Swiss data 2002--2009. The market price of risk is modelled in terms of proxies for uncertainty, which are estimated from interest rate options. The estimated model generates innovations in the 3-month rate that are similar to external evidence of monetary policy surprises - as well as term premia that are consistent with survey data. The results indicate that a surprise increase in the policy rate gives a reasonably sized decrease (-0.25%) in term premia for longer maturities.affine price of risk, interest rate caps, survey data

Inflation Forecast Uncertainty

We study the inflation uncertainty reported by individual forecasters in the Survey of Professional Forecasters 1969-2001. Three popular measures of uncertainty built from survey data are analyzed in the context of models for forecasting and asset pricing, and improved estimation methods are suggested. Popular time series models are evaluated for their ability to reproduce survey measures of uncertainty. The results show that disagreement is a better proxy of inflation uncertainty than what previous literature has indicated, and that forecasters underestimate inflation uncertainty. We obtain similar results for output growth uncertainty.survey data; Survey of Professional Forecasters; GDP growth; VAR; T-GARCH

The Time-Varying Systematic Risk of Carry Trade Strategies

This paper suggests a factor model for carry trade strategies where the regression coefficients are allowed to depend on market volatility and liquidity. Empirical results on daily data from 1995 to 2008 show that a typical carry trade strategy has much higher exposure to the stock market and also more mean reversion in volatile periods - and that FX market volatility is a priced risk factor. The findings are robust to various extensions, including using more currencies and other proxies for volatility and liquidity (VIX, TED and a bid-ask spread).carry trade, factor model, smooth transition regression, time-varying betas

Prediction of stock returns (in Russian)

This essay describes the basics of the stock market analysis, gives a survey of simple methods of searching for predictive patterns in returns, as well as lists empirical evidence of such predictability.

The Implementation of SNB Monetary Policy

We use a regime switching approach to model the implementation of the SNB monetary policy. The regime switching technique is crucial to assess the flexibility inherent in the SNB's monetary policy concept. The empirical findings support the idea that repo operations are instrumental in smoothing the implementation of monetary policy in normal times while changes in the official operational target accompanied by the accommodating use of repo operations produce the aimed effects in distressed periods. A significant contribution also came from some new measures designed to improve liquidity in the Swiss franc money market during the financial crisis in 2007- 8.implementation of monetary policy, Libor, repo, Swiss franc money market, regime switching model

New Techniques to Extract Market Expectations from Financial Instruments

This paper is a selective survey of new or recent methods to extract information about market expectations from asset prices for monetary policy purposes. Traditionally, interest rates and forward exchange rates have been used to extract expected means of future interest rates, exchange rates and inflation. More recently, these methods have been refined to rely on implied forward interest rates, so as to extract expected future time-paths. Very recently only the means but the whole (risk neutral) probability distribution from a set of option prices.

The Swedish business cycle: stylized facts over 130 years

Sweden ; Business cycles

Cyclical Properties of a Real Business Cycle Model.

This paper tests the well-known real business cycle model of Kydland and Prescott (1988), using spectral methods for linear filters. Model spectra, coherencies, phase shifts, and correlations are tested against U.S. post-war data using both asymptotic and small-sample distributions. Compared with the model, the data have shorter business cycles, smaller co-movements of different macro variables, and less of a leading role for output. Copyright 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.