This note documents a curious finding about the substantial forecast ability of a simple aggregator of three commodity futures prices for U.S. core inflation. The proposed aggregator reduces the out-of-sample root mean squared error for 12-month-ahead inflation forecasts of the benchmark AR(1)...

While the predictability of excess stock returns is detected by traditional predictive regressions as statistically small, the direction-of-change and volatility of returns exhibit a substantially larger degree of dependence over time. We capitalize on this observation and decompose the returns...

In this paper, we examine the forecasting ability of an affine term structure framework that jointly models the markets for Treasuries, inflation-protected securities, inflation derivatives, and oil future prices based on no-arbitrage restrictions across these markets. On the methodological...

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of carry trade strategies during and after the financial crisis using a flexible approach to modeling currency returns. We decompose the currency returns into multiplicative sign and absolute return components, which exhibit much greater predictability...

Forecast improvements can be expected if the two partners involved in a brokerage merger pool information and expertise. We examine four large mergers of brokerage firms in the last decade to study the incidence of and explanations for forecast improvements after the mergers. At the...

This paper uses the factor augmented regression framework to analyze the relation between bond excess returns and the macro economy. Using a panel of 131 monthly macroeconomic time series for the sample 1964:1-2007:12, we estimate 8 static factors by the method of asymptotic principal...