Interest rate risk in an emerging economy

The sharp decrease in inflation over the last decade—from 26% in 1990 to 4% in 2001—led the Central Bank of Chile to set its monetary policy interest rate in nominal terms since August 2001. This paper analyzes the effect of nominalization on the behavior of nominal, inflation-linked, and real interest rates, and its subsequent effects on the financial market. We find that nominalization has made nominal interest rates less volatile, while the opposite holds for inflation-linked interest rates. The effect on real interest rates is less unambiguous, but nominalization appears to have increased the cost of borrowing.     

The comparative forecast performance of univariate and multivariate models: an application to real interest rate forecasting

Does the use of information on the past history of the nominal interest rates and inflation entail improvement in forecasts of the ex ante real interest rate over its forecasts obtained from using just the past history of the realized real interest rates? To answer this question we set up a univariate unobserved components model for the realized real interest rates and a bivariate model for the nominal rate and inflation which imposes cointegration restrictions between them. The two models are estimated under normality with the Kalman filter. It is found that the error-correction model provides more accurate one-period ahead forecasts of the real rate within the estimation sample whereas the unobserved components model yields forecasts with smaller forecast variances. In the post-sample period, the forecasts from the bivariate model are not only more accurate but also have tighter confidence bounds than the forecasts from the unobserved components model.     

Nonlinear dynamics of interest rate and inflation

According to several empirical studies US inflation and nominal interest rates as well as the real interest rate can be described as unit root processes. These results imply that nominal interest rates and expected inflation do not move one‐for‐one in the long run, which is incongruent with theoretical models. In this paper we introduce a new nonlinear bivariate mixture autoregressive model that seems to fit quarterly US data (1953 : II–2004 : IV) reasonably well. It is found that the three‐month Treasury bill rate and inflation share a common nonlinear component that explains a large part of their persistence. The real interest rate is devoid of this component, indicating one‐for‐one movement of the nominal interest rate and inflation in the long run and, hence, stationarity of the real interest rate. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Nonlinearities and Fractional Integration in the US Unemployment Rate*

This paper proposes a model of the US unemployment rate which accounts for both its asymmetry and its long memory. Our approach introduces fractional integration and nonlinearities simultaneously into the same framework, using a Lagrange multiplier procedure with a standard null‐limit distribution. The empirical results suggest that the US unemployment rate can be specified in terms of a fractionally integrated process, which interacts with some nonlinear functions of labour‐demand variables such as real oil prices and real interest rates. We also find evidence of a long‐memory component. Our results are consistent with a hysteresis model with path dependency rather than a non‐accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) model with an underlying unemployment equilibrium rate, thereby giving support to more activist stabilization policies. However, any suitable model should also include business cycle asymmetries, with implications for both forecasting and policy‐making.     

基于AR模型的存款利率水平实证研究

本文建立了通货膨胀率、储蓄存款、消费对存款实际利率长期影响的AR模型,并通过实证检验发现四大现象:实际利率与名义利率的巨大差别;通货膨胀率是影响实际利率的最重要因素;储蓄存款和实际利率存在异象;消费膨胀促进加息。建议制定利率水平应更加及时,加速利率市场化改革,利用利率工具来抑制流动性过剩与通货膨胀。     

Inflation and interest rate derivatives for FX risk management: Implications for exporting firms under real wealth

Firms that export goods face risks such as product price, cost, and exchange rate risks. Price and cost risks can substantially reduce the FX hedging performance in real wealth. We thus investigate hedging strategies that are intended to improve the performance of the FX hedge in real terms using inflation and interest rate derivatives. The impact of these additional instruments is not clear and has only been briefly analyzed in the hedging literature so far. For this purpose, we derive variance-minimizing hedge positions of an exporting firm. A cointegrated VAR and bootstrap methods are used to evaluate the efficiencies of several hedging strategies. While inflation derivatives work better in the short run, interest rate derivatives perform better over longer hedge horizons.     

Can the Public's Desire for Future Benefits Be Deduced form Their Private Decisions?

Abstract . How should benefits and costs occurring at different times be evaluated to decide whether to undertake tax financed public projects? What interest rate should be used? If public decisions were based on people's willingness to pay for future private income, they still could not be based on market interest rates. The benefits of public projects (except in the cases of private land values or affected fixed private capital investments) are not marketable. However, among other things, market interest rates do represent the opportunity costs of public investments. Still, many citizens are concerned about the welfare of future generations; they may have a lower time preference rate. Human capital investments are directly analogous to public investment to produce non marketable public goods. Both are illiquid; both yield returns higher than market rates. This indicates the private rates of time preference for most citizens are high.     

Inflation illusion and the Taylor principle: An experimental study

We develop a simple experimental setting to evaluate the role of the Taylor principle, which holds that the nominal interest rate has to respond more than one-for-one to fluctuations in the inflation rate to exert a stabilizing effect. In our setting, the average inflation rate fluctuates around the inflation target if the computerized central bank obeys the Taylor principle. If the Taylor principle is violated, the average inflation rate persistently deviates from the target. These deviations from the target are less pronounced, if inflation rates cannot be as readily observed as nominal interest rates. This result is consistent with the interpretation that subjects underestimate the influence of inflation on the real return to savings if the inflation rate is only observed ex post.     

Around the world with Irving Fisher

This paper aims to show why Irving Fisher's own data on interest rates and inflation in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Calcutta, and Tokyo during 1825–1927 suggested to him that nominal interest rates adjusted neither quickly nor fully to changes in inflation, not even in the long run. In Fisher's data, interest rates evolve less rapidly than inflation and change less than inflation over time. Even so, the “Fisher effect” is commonly defined as a point-for-point effect of inflation on nominal interest rates rather than what Fisher actually found: a persistent negative effect of increased inflation on real interest rates.     

Long‐term rates: lower for longer

With the Federal Reserve and other central banks likely to start raising interest rates from next year, the focus is now on how high interest rates might ultimately go. Long‐term analysis of the path of interest rates in the world's main economies suggests that interest rates tend over time to gravitate towards a level reflecting long‐run growth and inflation. But there is scope for real interest rates to depart substantially from growth for lengthy periods of time. Based on our long‐run forecasts for growth and inflation we take the view that long‐term interest rates are likely to settle in at levels a bit lower than their recent historic averages. Structural changes in the world economy and vulnerabilities in the advanced economies are also likely to slow the process by which long‐term rates rise from current levels to their steady state positions. OE forecasts for long‐term rates in the major economies are generally lower at the 1‐year and long‐term horizons than consensus.     

投资房地产可以对冲通货膨胀风险吗——以中国内地为例

本文基于费雪效应,考察了中国内地过去20余年间通货膨胀率与房地产收益率的同期关系、长期均衡关系,以及在不同收益率条件分布下二者的关系。结果表明,短期内投资房地产不能对冲通货膨胀,但从长期来看,投资房地产却是对冲通货膨胀的有效工具。然而在房地产收益率处于"极端"情形下,盲目投资房地产不但不会抵御通货膨胀风险,还会带来更大的损失。     

Monetary policy with interest on reserves

I analyze monetary policy with interest on reserves and a large balance sheet. I show that conventional theories do not determine inflation in this regime, so I base the analysis on the fiscal theory of the price level. I find that monetary policy can peg the nominal rate, and determine expected inflation. With sticky prices, monetary policy can also affect real interest rates and output, though higher interest rates raise output and then inflation. The conventional sign requires a coordinated fiscal–monetary policy contraction. I show how conventional new-Keynesian models also imply strong monetary–fiscal policy coordination to obtain the usual signs. I address theoretical controversies. A concluding section places our current regime in a broader historical context, and opines on how optimal fiscal and monetary policy will evolve in the new regime.     

Impact of macroeconomic surprises on the Brazilian yield curve and expected inflation

This study investigates how unexpected announcements in Brazilian and U.S. macroeconomic indicators affect the term structure of nominal interest rates, as well as implicit inflation expectations and real interest rates. Using daily data from March 2005 to December 2012, we employ an extended Vector Error Correction Model to take into account nonstationarity and the long-term equilibrium among different maturities of those curves. We found empirical evidence that macroeconomic surprises, domestic (Brazilian) and external (U.S. American), which lead the market to believe that there might be a higher risk of inflation or an overheated economy, raise nominal interest rates, implicit expected inflation and real interest rates. Surprisingly, in relation to the efficient-market hypothesis, we found that some macroeconomic surprises have a lagged effect on the yield curves. We also tested the impact of the global financial crisis of 2007–09 and found that the crisis affected significantly the direction and magnitude of the responses to macroeconomic news.     

THE AUTUMN STATEMENT

The Treasury's forecast, published with the Autumn Statement, has been widely heralded as showing a surprisingly cheerful picture for next year as far as both output and inflation are concerned. In fact it is close to the forecast which we produced in October. Here we compare the two forecasts and then consider how our forecast is affected when we adopt the Treasury assumptions on asset sales and the exchange rate. We find that the Treasury is more optimistic than we are on investment and that holding the exchange rate - which is needed to produce the official inflation forecast - requires rather higher interest rates than we assumed in October and this widens the gap between our forecast for GDP and the Treasury's forecast.
We also consider how the government should respond to lower North Sea oil revenues. Taking a permanent income approach, we suggest that the PSBR should be allowed to rise by £2bn on this basis. The same approach, however, suggests that an extra £71/2bn of asset sales should be used to cut the PSBR not taxes. On balance therefore this analysis indicates that next year's PSBR target should be lowered by £1/2bn from the £71/2 bn contained in the 1985 MTFS.     

Nominal interest rate policy rules and the feasibility of real interest rate control

In this paper the author builds a financial market model to demonstrate that policy aimed at reducing the variance in nominal interest rates reduces the information content of these variables. This has the undesirable effect of destabilizing real interest rates. The researcher demonstrates that nominal interest rate policy rules stabilize the component of the variance in the ex ante real interest rate attributable to the variance in the nominal rate. The variability of the expected inflation rate can, however, be increased by such policy rules, making the net effect of a nominal interest rate policy on the variance in the real interest rate ambiguous.     

Oil exports and the Iranian economy

This paper presents an error-correcting macroeconometric model for the Iranian economy estimated using a new quarterly data set over the period 1979Q1–2006Q4. It builds on a recent paper by the authors, Esfahani, Mohaddes, and Pesaran (in press), which develops a theoretical long-run growth model for major oil exporting economies. The core variables included in this paper are real output, real money balances, inflation, exchange rate, oil exports, and foreign real output, although the role of investment and consumption are also analysed in a sub-model. The paper finds clear evidence for the existence of two long-run relations: an output equation as predicted by the theory and a standard real money demand equation with inflation acting as a proxy for the (missing) market interest rate. The results show that real output in the long run is influenced by oil exports and foreign output. However, it is also found that inflation has a significant negative long-run effect on real GDP, which is suggestive of economic inefficiencies and is matched by a negative association between inflation and the investment–output ratio. Finally, the results of impulse responses show that the Iranian economy adjusts quite quickly to the shocks in foreign output and oil exports, which could be partly due to the relatively underdeveloped nature of Iran's financial markets.     

Demographics and the long-horizon returns of dividend-yield strategies

This paper investigates the relationship between demographic changes and the long-run returns of dividend-yield investment strategies. We hypothesise that in a world where components of wealth are mentally treated as being non-fungible, the preference for high dividend-paying stocks by older investors means that the excess returns of high dividend-yielding stocks, relative to other stocks, should be positively related to demographic clientele variation. In particular, we find that, consistent with the behavioural life-cycle hypothesis, long-run returns of dividend-yield investment strategies are positively driven by changes in the proportion of the older population. Our results are robust when controlled for the Fama–French factors, inflation rate, consumption growth rate, interest rates, tax clienteles, time trend and alternative definitions of both dividend-yield strategies and demographic variation.     

Forecast Summary

The sluggish response of the current account to severe monetary tightening has put pressure on the exchange rate, which was instrumental in the decision to raise base rates to an eight-year high of 15 per cent. In so doing, the government has declared itself ready to risk recession to hold the pound - its main bulwark against rising inflation. Our forecast illustrates the risk. Compared with June, when we saw the economy avoiding a hard landing in the short term (at the cost of a protracted battle to reduce inflation over the medium term), the present forecast projects a sharp deceleration in output next year. Over the medium term output grows a disappointing 2 per centp.a., unemployment starts to rise and it is not until 1992 that retail price inflation is back below 5 per cent.     

Estimating the demand for money in Canada: Does including an own rate of return matter?

Traditional studies estimating the long-run demand for real money in Canada assume that narrow money, or M1, bears zero interest. However if implicit interest has been paid, such interest should be taken into account in determining the opportunity cost of holding money. Using quarterly data over the period 1961:1–2000:3 we construct and employ a competitive own rate of return variable. Over 1961:1–1982:1, the conventional money demand model which omits an own rate of return performs well. Over the period 1982:2–2000:3, where the degree of competition in the banking industry increased, the conventional money demand model does not perform well, whereas inclusion of the own rate of return yields correct parameter estimates.