Bond Yields Research Articles

Portfolio balance effect of the U.S. QE between commodities and financial assets in commodity-exporting countries

This study analyses the portfolio balance channel of the U.S. quantitative easing (QE) by assessing the dynamic spillover effect between commodities and financial assets in commodity-exporting countries during QE. This study integrates the generalized spillover index initially proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) for the fractional integration VAR model. Then, we estimate the multivariate framework of the Westerlund and Narayan (2015) (WN)-based predictive model to quantify the effect of the portfolio balance channel on the net pairwise spillover index from the U.S. to other countries. Our results show: first, for bond yields, that Asian and Pacific bond yields are impacted by both commodity price indices returns and the U.S. bond yields across the sample periods. However, mixed evidence is found for both Latin America and Others; second, for equity, dynamic net return spillovers contribute mixed evidence across regional groups during QE. The diverse results are partly explained by the average percentage of commodity exports to total exports of the country and the degree of close interrelationship between countries. Additionally, dynamic return spillover analyses show that most foreign exchange returns are negative net spillovers during QE, supporting the behavior of “commodity currencies.” Last, the WN-based predictability models show pronounced differences in predictability across the selected commodity-exporting countries.

Equilibrium yield curves with imperfect information

I study the dynamics of default-free bond yields and term premia using a novel equilibrium term structure model with a New-Keynesian core and imperfect information about productivity. Imperfect information can justify a shock to signals about productivity that does not lead to actual changes in productivity, which can be interpreted as a demand shock. When incorporated in a DSGE term structure model with a standard productivity shock, this demand shock generates term premia that are on average higher, with sizable countercyclical variation that arises endogenously. The model helps reconcile the empirical evidence that term premia have been on average positive and countercyclical, with numerous studies pointing to demand shocks as a key driver of business cycles over the last few decades.

Dynamics effect of volatility index, interest rates, and commodity prices on Indonesian bond yields

Several factors influence the movements and dynamics of bond yields in financial markets. The determination of monetary policy, specifically the decisions regarding interest rates made by central banks, is a critical factor. Moreover, bond yields can be influenced by various factors such as geopolitical events, financial volatility, market sentiment, and investor risk appetite. These factors can impact the demand and supply dynamics in bond markets. This research aims to analyze the influence of Interest Rates, IDR to USD Exchange Rates, Volatility Index (VIX), Gold and Oil Prices on Bond Yields in Indonesia. The data used in this research is secondary data, which consists of time series data from 2019-2023. This research investigates the impact of financial and commodity prices on bond yields in Indonesia by using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to examine both the long-run correlation and short-run effect. Empirical results found that Interest Rate, Volatility Index (VIX), and Oil Prices have a significant positive influence. Meanwhile, the Gold Price variable has a significant negative influence. This research has several crucial policy implications for investors concerning the national monetary policy, exchange rate fluctuation, and global volatility index to create profitable and sustainable portfolio strategies. Moreover, investment managers and investors should be concerned about the global commodities prices that will affect bond yield performances. This research contributes to the recent literature presenting causal relations of global volatility index (VIX) on Indonesian bond yield.

Assessing the baseline model of WTI oil and stock returns under financial volatility and spillover effects

Do financial volatility shocks matter for WTI oil and stock markets? They should since world economic activity responds to volatility. To investigate this question, we revisit two empirical frameworks widely used in the literature. Our baseline involves the standard identification of oil shocks in structural vector autoregressions (SVAR) with (world) oil supply, demand, and real oil prices. We then propose a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model integrating 14 major world economies. We introduce the volatility measure (VIX), various stock markets, and compare two oil demand proxies: real economic activity (REA) based on commodity prices and world industrial production (WIP). The results of the impulse response analysis do not indicate major differences across models. However, when measuring the share of oil price variance explained by shocks to VIX (or to U.S. high-bond corporate yield) SVAR overestimates the influence of VIX. We find (world) demand shocks explain a larger part of the variance of oil and stock markets compared to supply shocks. In SVAR, new information coming from a one standard deviation shock to VIX is incorporated negatively and instantaneously on real oil prices: −1.6 for REA and −1.4 for WIP. In GVAR these are reduced slightly to −1.2 from VIX and to −0.6 if coming from corporate bond yield shocks. Our study highlights the sensitivity of econometric results to distinct approaches: one that identifies shocks and another that captures spillover effects.

Unconventional monetary policy and policy foresight

What are the effects of unconventional monetary policy interventions on the economy? Empirical studies utilizing traditional SVAR models consistently report expansionary effects on output and prices while considering only a small number of variables. This paper is the first to present both narrative and empirical evidence indicating that these models are susceptible to policy foresight, as central banks frequently announce their unconventional policies months in advance. To address policy foresight, we estimate a Bayesian FAVAR model with an extended set of information for the Euro Area. Consistent with the existing literature, we find that an unconventional monetary policy shock boosts economic activity by increasing industrial production and reducing the unemployment rate. Notably, our estimated effects are both larger and more persistent compared to previous findings. Furthermore, the shock decreases interest rates, interest rate spreads, and government bond yields, leading to an improvement in financial conditions. In a noteworthy departure from previous research, we find significant uncertainty regarding the impacts on consumer and producer prices, highlighting the need for further research.

Balance sheet expansionary policies in the euro area: Macroeconomic impacts and a vulnerable versus non-vulnerable comparison

This paper investigates the impacts and heterogeneity of the ECB's large-scale asset purchasing programs of sovereign securities on real GDP, inflation, long-term sovereign bond yields, systemic stress, and the unemployment rate. A structural Bayesian VAR model with six endogenous variables was estimated for 11 euro area countries over the period 2012:M1 to 2023:M12. To provide robustness to the results, a structural panel BVAR model is estimated, enabling a straightforward comparison of impulse responses of vulnerable and non-vulnerable countries. The results suggest that the magnitudes of impulse responses were more favorable in countries that were more economically and financially vulnerable. These findings underscore that financial and economic distress was a source of heterogeneity in the responses to large scale asset purchases within the euro area.

Factors influencing green bond yield: Evidence from Asia and Latin American countries

Despite numerous studies in the domain of green bonds, a paucity of literature concentrates on emerging countries’ green bonds. To fill this void, this study aims to examine the factors influencing green bond yield in the Asian and Latin American contexts. The data are compiled from the Bloomberg and Fred databases between 2017 and 2022. The panel regression with the Generalized Least Square method was employed. The results reveal that Asian green bonds provide higher yields with less risk to their investors than Latin American green bonds. The regression results of Asian green bonds show negligible effects of all factors, except coupon rate with a positive effect (β = 0.844), indicating its remarkable influence on green bond yield. However, the findings of Latin American green bonds uncover that coupon (β = 0.780), maturity (β = 0.025), and bond rate (β = 2.472) surpass the green bonds yield due to their positive effects, whereas issue size (β = –1.215) causes a reduction in the green bonds yield with their negative effect. Further, Environmental, Social, and Governance disclosure shows a positive (β = 1.611) effect, indicating better yield for investors due to their potential power to vanish greenwashing in these markets. Moreover, interest rate and GDP exert significant positive (β = 0.141) and negative (β = –0.030) effects on green bond yield, respectively. This observation implies that higher lending rates increase bond yield, whereas GDP-led growth provides lower yield due to better economic prospects and high investor demand for the bonds. AcknowledgmentThe authors are grateful to Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), Manipal, for providing financial assistance in the form of a “JRF Contingency Grant” for this research article.

Global and local information efficiency: An examination of samuelson's dictum

The global version of Samuelson's Dictum is the conjecture that there is more informational inefficiency for global information than for country-specific information. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that sovereign CDS spreads can predict future sovereign bond yields of their underlying countries and this predictive power arises almost entirely from CDS spread's global—rather than country-specific—component. Noting the striking similarities between the evidence in stock and sovereign bond markets, we examine the underlying mechanism for the results in both markets in parallel and find further similarities across these two markets. In both cases, information appears to flow in one direction: from the sovereign CDS market to stock and sovereign bond markets and not the other way around. Information transmission occurs mostly during the days surrounding announcements of credit-rating or outlook changes, especially downgrades. These results are broadly consistent with a setup in which information acquisition and processing is costly.

A Multicountry Model of the Term Structures of Interest Rates with a GVAR

Abstract Extant multicountry affine term structure models (ATSMs) handle global financial interdependence at the cost of increasing model dimensionality. To address this challenge, we propose a novel no-arbitrage ATSM with risk factor dynamics following a global vector-autoregressive (GVAR). Compared to referenced benchmarks, the GVAR − ATSM offers a more parsimonious representation, enables a faster estimation process, produces more precise model estimates, yields more plausible term premia dynamics, and improves bond yield out-of-sample forecasting. Furthermore, our empirical findings reveal the significant impact of China’s economic stances on Latin American yield curve dynamics, underscoring its importance as a global economic player.

Impact of Global and Domestic Factors on Indian Government Bond Yields

Impact of Global and Domestic Factors on Indian Government Bond Yields

AN ANALYSIS OF THE LONG-TERM ASYMMETRIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GOLD PRICES, EXCHANGE RATES, YIELDS OF GOVERNMENT BOND, AND THE BIST100 INDEX

This study examines the asymmetric effects of the gold price, the USD/TRY exchange rate, the corporate governance index, and the 10-year government bond yield on the BIST100 index, thus delving into the intricate web of financial markets. Using weekly data from September 2007 to September 2023, we employed the nonlinear ARDL model to examine the asymmetric effects of the variables on the BIST100 index. As a result, the nonlinear ARDL bound test proved the long-term cointegration between the BIST100 index and the explanatory variables used in the analysis. All asymmetric variables except the negative variable of gold price had statistically significant long-run effects on the BIST100 index. Government bond yields and gold price had negative effects on the stock index, while USD/TRY exchange rate and corporate governance index had positive effects on it. The Wald test's null hypothesis of no long-term asymmetries was rejected for government bond yields, the USD/TRY exchange rate, and the corporate governance index. On the other hand, the test for short-term asymmetry was rejected only for the corporate governance index. Accordingly, the corporate governance index has both short-term and long-term asymmetric effects on the BIST100 index, while government bond yields and the dollar exchange rate have only long-term asymmetric effects on it.

Search friction, liquidity risk, and bond misallocation

Search friction is a key driver of changes in corporate bond yield spreads over time. In the cross-section, the liquidity risk stemming from search friction is significantly priced, and is strongly correlated with the misallocation of bond positions among different traders. I propose a novel measure of bond-specific misallocation, which is the negative covariance between traders’ private valuations and their inventory positions for each bond. I find that bonds with higher levels of misallocation are associated with lower absolute levels of liquidity risk from search friction. I develop a search-and-matching model to explain this correlation.

Dynamic characteristics of expectations of short-term interest rate and a generalized Vasicek model

This study's principal mathematical deduction exploits the importance of the specification of long-term equilibrium level in the mean-reversion short-term interest rate model—such as the CKLS (Chan, Karolyi, Longstaff, and Sanders) model—to describe the dynamic characteristics of future short-term interest rate expectations, especially long-horizon expectations. Therefore, we present a preferred model by introducing a stochastic long-run equilibrium level factor to extend the specifications of the Vasicek model's short-term interest rate dynamics. Using this new type of short-term interest rate as a driver we develop a two-factor affine arbitrage-free model of term structure, the generalized Vasicek mode. The empirical results show that the model not only has a good sample fitting ability to the Chinese government bond yield curve, but also has better performance in capturing the dynamic characteristics of short-term interest rates and short-term interest rate expectations. This study provides not only a promising avenue for future research on improving interest rate modeling techniques and their practical applications in the financial industry but also a new literature base for accurately identifying public expectations and explaining the underlying mechanisms of expectation changes.

The asymmetric effects of quantitative tightening and easing on financial markets

We study the asymmetric impact of US quantitative tightening (QT) and easing (QE) on financial markets using high-frequency large-scale asset purchase surprises around FOMC announcements. We document that QT surprises since 2017 had larger and more persistent effects on US Treasury yields than QE surprises. Using numerous empirical decompositions of bond yields, we show that this asymmetry arises from the differential effect of QT vs. QE surprises on expectations of future short-term rates (linked to the so-called signalling channel) at shorter maturities.

Bond yield spreads and exchange market pressure in emerging countries

Bond yield spreads and exchange market pressure in emerging countries

A consumption-based term structure model of bonds and equity

In this study, I propose a consumption-based asset pricing model to capture the dynamic properties of term structures of bonds and equity. I extend the long-run risks model by introducing a mean-reversion of dividend growth and the external habit formation of a representative agent. The mean-reverting dividend growth generates a negative equity term premium, while the habit formation augments the equity premium and renders an upward-sloping bond yield curve, on average. In addition, fluctuations in the surplus consumption ratio and the conditional variance of consumption growth allow the model to reproduce pro-cyclical variations in bond and equity yield spreads and counter-cyclical variations in bond and equity term premiums, as observed in the U.S. data.

Volatility Connectedness of MOVE Index and Bond Returns

Research Originality: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study which measures the impact of the MOVE index on bond yield volatility by comparing its effect on both short-term and long-term. The paper contributes to the existing literature by providing a better understanding of the relationship between maturity and volatility spillover. Research Objectives: This study examines the dynamic volatility connectedness between 2 and 10-year bond yields and the MOVE Index. Furthermore, it is aimed at detecting the transmitter of volatility among variables. Research Methods: Using a data set from 2010 to 2022, the study utilizes a Time-Varying Parameter Vector Autoregression (TVP-VAR) model to analyse the dynamics and relationship between bond yields and the MOVE Index. Empirical Results: The study finds a significant volatility spillover between the MOVE Index and Türkiye's bond yields. Notably, the linkage between the MOVE Index and the 10-year bond rates is stronger than with the 2-year rates. Additionally, the MOVE Index emerges as the primary transmitter of volatility, impacting both bond yields. Implications: This study sheds light on the complexity and dynamics of volatility spread in Türkiye's bond market, providing essential insights for forecasting bond yields and shaping financial policies.JEL Classification: G17, C22, G12How to Cite:Baykut, E., Gökgöz, H. (2024). Volatility Connectedness of MOVE Index and Bond Returns. Etikonomi, 23(1), 27 – 46. https://doi.org/10.15408/etk.v23i1.36131.

The relationship between the inflation rate and the unemployment rate in Poland and their long-term associations with selected macroeconomic variables

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the inflation and unemployment rates in Poland and to analyze their long-term relationships with selected macroeconomic variables: the WIG20 index, consisting of the 20 largest Polish companies noted on Warsaw Stock Exchange, the USD/PLN exchange rate, the Brent crude oil index, and the interest rate on 10-year government bond yields. The main objective of the study is to determine the relationship between inflation and unemployment. In this study, a vector error correction model (VECM) was used to study long-run dependence. The impulse response function and forecast error variance decomposition were also used to examine the interactions between variables. There is one long-run relationship between the factors studied. Both the values of the VECM model parameters and the results of the impulse response function indicate that there is a negative relationship between inflation and unemployment in the short term. In the long term, there is a positive relationship, resulting in the stagflation phenomenon.

An affine term structure model with Fed chairs’ speeches

I analyze the impact of the sentiment expressed in speeches by Fed chairs on Treasury bond yields, using an affine term structure model. The speeches by Fed chairs are numerically evaluated to generate three sentiment factors: negative, neutral, and positive. The variance decomposition analysis indicates that sentiment factors account for a considerable portion of the variance in yield forecasts.

Buying into new ideas: the ECB’s evolving justification of unlimited liquidity

Abstract In 2012, Draghi put an end to rising euro area sovereign bond yield spreads by resolving to do ‘whatever it takes’. The crisis rhetoric and institutional practices of unlimited liquidity have since become commonplace, as countermeasures to recent market turmoil show. This article sets out to explain how and why ‘unlimited liquidity’ ideas moved to the ECB’s center of economic analysis during the euro crisis. Previous work fails to decipher that the ideational shift was highly anomalous when viewed against German ordoliberalism or scholarly support for ‘expansionary austerity’. Addressing this relative neglect in other accounts, we draw on qualitative text analysis and expert interviews to argue that this shift was due to norm entrepreneurs who capitalized on the uncertainty of the crisis. We employ constructivist arguments to identify four scoping conditions that account for the ascendance of ‘unlimited liquidity’: an indicative reference, credibility, institutional positioning and—as an extension to the literature—intellectual sensitivity. Our analysis suggests that the euro crisis changed economic ideas, and fundamentally remodels the constructivist framework for studying monetary policy in crisis times.