Macroeconomic News in Asset Pricing and Reality

Revisions in successive Greenbook forecasts of quarterly real GDP growth proxy for news of current and expected future economic growth. In the sample 1975 through 2015, news of future growth is slightly negatively related to contemporaneous changes in Treasury bond yields, while news of current growth is strongly positively related to changes in these yields. Both results are difficult to reconcile with a representative agent's bondholding first-order condition. A continuous-time dynamic model of output attributes almost all of the covariation with yields to martingale innovations in log output and a minimal amount to innovations in the conditional drift of log output.