Central Bank Actions and Words: The Intraday Effects of FOMC Policy Communications on Individual Equity Volatility and Returns

We compare intraday impacts of the release of Federal Reserve decision announcements and of Federal Open Market Committee minutes between 2004 and 2015 on 1,997 equity return and volatility series. We find that returns are unresponsive to either news release, but conditional volatility increases for both, manifesting immediately after each information release, and persisting for 30 minutes post‐announcement. These effects are larger for decisions than for minutes. On stratifying firms by trading intensity, we find most “high trading intensity” firms respond to these announcements, while “low trading intensity” firms are less affected. Our results show that traders respond, albeit differently, to both sets of information releases.     

The bond event study methodology since 1974

In the spirit of methodology reviews for stock event studies, like the one prepared by Binder (Rev Quant Financ Account 11:111–137, 1998), this paper discusses the development of the event study methodology for corporate bonds since its first application with Katz (J Financ 29:551–559, 1974). The motivation to conduct this review stems from two sources: First, the methodology utilized for stocks cannot simply be applied to bonds, as bonds present several features that strongly distinguish them from stocks. An erroneous model could lead to false conclusions about the impact of new information on a firm’s debt. Second, the availability of new sources for bond data enables the application of bond event studies for an increasing number of research frameworks. Thus, future research ought to be interested in the selection of the proper methodology. Consequently, this paper illustrates past and present event study methods utilized to calculate abnormal bond returns and reviews the applied parametric and non-parametric test statistics. Besides, insight on how the availability of corporate bond data has evolved through the last four decades, as well as the impact on prevailing methodology is provided. Altogether, this paper provides a first extensive snapshot of the current bond event study methodology and offers guidance for future research.     

Market completion with derivative securities

Let \(S^{F}\) be a ?-martingale representing the price of a primitive asset in an incomplete market framework. We present easily verifiable conditions on the model coefficients which guarantee the completeness of the market in which in addition to the primitive asset, one may also trade a derivative contract \(S^{B}\). Both \(S^{F}\) and \(S^{B}\) are defined in terms of the solution \(X\) to a two-dimensional stochastic differential equation: \(S^{F}_{t} = f(X_{t})\) and \(S^{B}_{t}:=\mathbb{E}[g(X_{1}) | \mathcal{F}_{t}]\). From a purely mathematical point of view, we prove that every local martingale under ? can be represented as a stochastic integral with respect to the ?-martingale \(S :=(S^{F}, S^{B})\). Notably, in contrast to recent results on the endogenous completeness of equilibria markets, our conditions allow the Jacobian matrix of \((f,g)\) to be singular everywhere on \(\mathbb{R}^{2}\). Hence they cover as a special case the prominent example of a stochastic volatility model being completed with a European call (or put) option.     

Effect of Stress on Later-Life Health: Evidence from the Vietnam War Draft

This article contributes to the literature examining how stress during the early stages of life impacts later-life health using a novel proxy for stress: risk of military induction during the Vietnam War. The article estimates that an increase in induction risk in young adulthood is associated with higher rates of obesity, endocrine disease, and hypertension later in life. These findings do not appear to be cohort effects; these associations exist only for men who did not serve in the war, not for same-aged women. These results suggest stress experienced during early adulthood can have adverse health consequences later in life.     

ON THE WELFARE PROPERTIES OF FRACTIONAL RESERVE BANKING

Monetary economists have long recognized a tension between the benefits of fractional reserve banking, such as the ability to undertake more profitable (long‐term) investment opportunities, and the difficulties associated with it, such as the risk of insolvency for each bank and the associated losses to bank liability holders. I show that a specific banking arrangement (a joint‐liability scheme) provides an effective mechanism for ensuring the ex post transfer of reserves from liquid banks to illiquid banks, so it is possible to select a socially efficient reserve ratio in the banking system that preserves the safety of bank liabilities as a store of value and maximizes the rate of return paid to bank liability holders.     

股价波动、社会福利与货币政策制定——基于中国DSGE模型的模拟分析

文章构建了一个包含股票市场财富效应和稳态股利水平且反映中国现实特征的DSGE模型,通过扩展的货币政策泰勒规则,考察了面对技术冲击、利率冲击和股票市场冲击时,中央银行应如何制定货币政策以保持产出、价格和股票市场的稳定,并尽可能地降低社会福利损失.结果表明,货币政策考虑股价波动能够有效降低社会福利损失;中央银行存在多重调控目标时需要注意区分冲击的类型来相机抉择,在利率冲击下,货币政策应当对股价波动做出反应,而在技术冲击和股票市场冲击下,则需要在各个经济变量之间进行权衡.     

On domain modelling of the service system with its application to enterprise information systems

Information systems are a kind of service systems and they are throughout every element of a modern industrial and business system, much like blood in our body. Types of information systems are heterogeneous because of extreme uncertainty in changes in modern industrial and business systems. To effectively manage information systems, modelling of the work domain (or domain) of information systems is necessary. In this paper, a domain modelling framework for the service system is proposed and its application to the enterprise information system is outlined. The framework is defined based on application of a general domain modelling tool called function-context-behaviour-principle-state-structure (FCBPSS). The FCBPSS is based on a set of core concepts, namely: function, context, behaviour, principle, state and structure and system decomposition. Different from many other applications of FCBPSS in systems engineering, the FCBPSS is applied to both infrastructure and substance systems, which is novel and effective to modelling of service systems including enterprise information systems. It is to be noted that domain modelling of systems (e.g. enterprise information systems) is a key to integration of heterogeneous systems and to coping with unanticipated situations facing to systems.     

Life Cycle Price Trends and Product Replacement: Implications for the Measurement of Inflation

The paper explores the extent to which products follow systematic pricing patterns over their life cycle and the impact this has on the measurement of inflation. Using a large U.S. scanner data set on supermarket products and applying flexible regression methods, we find that on average prices decline as items age. This life cycle price change is often attributed to quality difference in the construction of CPI as items are replaced due to disappearance or during sample rotations. This introduces a systematic bias in the measurement of inflation. For our data we find that the life cycle bias leads to the underestimation of inflation by around 0.30 percentage points each year for the products examined.