Decision-makers are confronted with decisions under uncertainty. Financial uncertainty may adversely affect growth. Theoretically, forecasts may potentially reduce uncertainty and create economic value. Focusing on survey predictions, this cumulative dissertation addresses the economic relevance of interest rate, crude oil and exchange rate forecasts for policy as well as managerial decision-makers and financial market participants, respectively. The first research objective of the presented studies is to compile novel evidence on the accuracy, rationality and usefulness of financial market...
What impact do random events have on individuals? How do they adapt to living in an uncertain stochastic environment? This work pays tribute to the contribution of James L. Ford to our understanding of these themes.
The compendium of papers in this volume focuses on aspects of economic uncertainty, financial instabilities and asset bubbles.Economic uncertainty is modeled in continuous time using the mathematical techniques of stochastic calculus. A detailed treatment of important topics is provided, including the existence and uniqueness of asymptotic economic growth, the modeling of inflation and interest rates, the decomposition of inflation and its volatility, and the extension of the quantity theory of money to allow for randomness.The reader is also introduced to the methods of chaotic dynamics, and this methodology is applied to asset pricing, the European equity markets, and the multi-fractality in foreign currency markets.Since the techniques of stochastic calculus and chaotic dynamics do not readily accommodate the presence of stochastic bubbles, several papers discuss in depth the presence of financial bubbles in asset prices, and econometric work is performed to link such bubbles to monetary policy.Finally, since bubbles often burst rather than deflate slowly, the last section of the book studies the crash of October 1987 as well as other crashes of national equity markets due to the Persian gulf crisis.
The global crude oil market is critically important in many respects. It is the fuel that drives the global economy and, as such, is the focus of climate policies. Moreover, crude oil is the basis of a tradable financial asset. It is therefore connected to several outstanding macroeconomic developments of recent years, including financial market fluctuations, the financial crisis and the exceptional conduct of monetary policy. This book investigates the impacts of monetary policy and the financial system on the global crude oil market. Furthermore, it outlines how monetary policy may also be used to guarantee stability and to contribute to ecological sustainability.
This paper examines the relationship between monetary policy and oil prices within a world oil demand and supply model. Low price and high income elasticities of demand and rigid supply explain high price volatilities and producers' market power. Exchange and interest rates do influence oil market equilibrium. The relationship between oil prices and interest rates is a two-way relationship that depends on the type of oil shock. During a supply shock, rising oil prices caused interest rates to increase; whereas during a demand shock, falling interest rates caused oil prices to rise. Record low interest rates led to high oil price volatility in 2005. Data shows that world economic growth and price stability require stable oil markets and therefore more prudent monetary policies.
This dissertation examines the interaction between macroeconomic aggregates and financial markets in two different essays. The expansion of derivatives markets has prompted interest in estimating options-implied measures to analyze market participants’ beliefs about future movements in the prices of these derivatives’ underlying assets and the probability these participants assign to unlikely events (see Datta et al., 2014). In this spirit, analyzing oil market is important for two main reasons. First, among all commodities, crude oil futures and derivatives are the most traded and liquid asset in the whole commodity market. Second, the informational content of oil derivatives can be indicative of shifts in global economic expectations which may be of interests to producers, investors and policy makers. Because the risk neutral density (RND, hereafter) consists of information from various option series that have a wide range of strike prices and maturities, we can conjecture more detailed effects of news announcements on market sentiment by investigating the changes in the RND. Chapter 1 links the crude oil market to macroeconomic risk by studying the RND around the U.S. macroeconomic news announcements. I use a non-parametric method to recover the RND and conduct regression analysis using daily data. The analysis provides several noteworthy results. First, I find that the RND is systematically affected by certain macroeconomic news announcements. Second, after controlling for the content of the news, my results indicate that good news tend to make the distribution less negatively skewed, whereas bad news have an opposite effect. However, I do not find any systematic pattern between the content (bad/good) of the news and the implied volatility or kurtosis. Hence, my results show that better/worse-than-expected news in macroeconomic announcements may both increase and decrease implied volatility and kurtosis of the option implied distribution. Finally my estimates obtained from nonlinear regressions display that the magnitude of the surprise may play into this effect; for example worse-than-expected news in Housing Starts announcement decrease the implied volatility and increase the implied kurtosis only when the size of surprise is not too large. How should a central bank conduct monetary policy in the presence of financial shocks? In Chapter 2, I use different nonlinear policy rules and address this question. Most empirical work on monetary policy relies on simple linear policy rules, however it is not clear whether such a rule can be an adequate representation of a process as complex as that of monetary policy. I first estimate Markov Switching Taylor rules with constant transition probabilities to allow for state-contingent policy making during 1987.3-2008.4. As a proxy for financial stress, I use the Adjusted National Financial Conditions Index constructed by the Chicago Fed. Then, I allow transition probabilities driving the monetary policy stance to vary over time and be a function of economic and financial indicators. The paper provides clear-cut evidence that, during the Greenspan-Bernanke tenure, the U.S. monetary policy can be characterized falling into two distinct regimes; a conventional regime where the Fed puts a greater emphasis on targeting inflation while stabilizing the economic outlook and a distressed regime where the Fed responds aggressively to output gaps and is less concerned with inflation. The distressed regime is closely correlated with times of financial imbalances. The empirical results show that nonlinear models outperform the simple linear specification in terms of model fit and the ability to track the actual interest rate. Also, the economic and financial indicators are found to be informative in dating the evolution of the state of the monetary policy stance. The results have implications for nonlinear rules to be a useful guideline for forecasting and policy analysis.
There has been much interest in the relationship between the price of crude oil, the value of the U.S. dollar, and the U.S. interest rate since the 1980s. For example, the sustained surge in the real price of oil in the 2000s is often attributed to the declining real value of the U.S. dollar as well as low U.S. real interest rates, along with a surge in global real economic activity. Quantifying these effects one at a time is difficult not only because of the close relationship between the interest rate and the exchange rate, but also because demand and supply shocks in the oil market in turn may affect the real value of the dollar and real interest rates. We propose a novel identification strategy for disentangling the causal effects of oil demand and oil supply shocks from the effects of exogenous shocks to the U.S. real interest rate and exogenous shocks to the real value of the U.S. dollar. We empirically evaluate popular views about the role of exogenous real exchange rate shocks in driving the real price of oil, and we examine the extent to which shocks in the global oil market drive the U.S. real exchange rate and U.S. real interest rates. Our evidence for the first time provides direct empirical support for theoretical models of the link between oil prices, exchange rates, and interest rates.
This paper presents a simple macroeconomic model of the oil market. The model incorporates features of oil supply such as depletion, endogenous oil exploration and extraction, as well as features of oil demand such as the secular increase in demand from emerging-market economies, usage efficiency, and endogenous demand responses. The model provides, inter alia, a useful analytical framework to explore the effects of: a change in world GDP growth; a change in the efficiency of oil usage; and a change in the supply of oil. Notwithstanding that shale oil production today is more responsive to prices than conventional oil, our analysis suggests that an era of prolonged low oil prices is likely to be followed by a period where oil prices overshoot their long-term upward trend.
We explore the possible causal effect of economic policy uncertainty on the connectedness of crude oil and currency markets using a sample of commodity currencies from advanced and emerging nations. A battery of linear and nonlinear Granger-based causality tests indicate the presence of a causal relationship between economic policy uncertainty and the connectedness of oil and currency markets, particularly at low frequencies and notably in the case of spillovers from oil to the Australian dollar. While crude oil is found to serve as a net transmitter of shocks to currencies across all frequency bands, the spillover effects from oil are largely concentrated towards the G10 currencies of AUD and NZD that are often used as investment currencies in carry trade strategies. Overall, our findings suggest the presence of a short run, pass-through effect of economic policy uncertainty via oil prices, spilling over to the currency market, providing support for the portfolio and wealth channel that facilitates risk transmissions across these markets.
