We propose a comprehensive empirical examination of the time-varying leading properties of two high yield spreads in the United States and compare them with the leading properties of the term spread between the mid-1980s and the end of 2011. We show that high yield spreads are not reliable...

The term structure of domestic investment grade bond spreads - or corporate spread curve - contains useful information to predict future changes in industrial production, beyond the information already contained in interest rates, commercial paper-treasury bill spreads, and lagged values of...

The cyclical variation behavior of the mortgage spread has motivated some studies to investigate its relationship to economic activity. Indeed, recent empirical findings indicate that the mortgage spread is a determinant/predictor of economic activity. We define the mortgage spread as the...

Narratives that portray macroeconomic policies in Japan as unlike ones pursued in other large economies persist. I revisit how several factors, including monetary, fiscal, and demographic factors impact Japan, the US, and the euro area. Panel VARs driven by factors or observed macroeconomic...

How far to go – and to remain – in the direction of highly expansionary monetary policy hinges on the balance of marginal benefits and costs of additional monetary easing and its expected evolution over time. This paper sketches a framework for assessing this balance and applies it to four...

We construct a slope factor from changes in federal funds futures of different horizons. Slope predicts stock returns at the weekly frequency: faster monetary policy easing positively predicts excess returns. Investors can achieve increases in weekly Sharpe ratios of 20% conditioning on the...

We use non-Gaussian features in U.S. macroeconomic data to identify aggregate supply and demand shocks while imposing minimal economic assumptions. Recessions in the 1970s and 1980s were driven primarily by supply shocks, later recessions were driven primarily by demand shocks, and the Great...

We estimate a medium-scale macro-finance DSGE model of the term structure. By expanding the macro part of macro-finance models, historical fluctuations in US bond yields turn out to be largely consistent with the rational expectations hypothesis. This stands in contrast to extant macro-finance...

The ability of term spread to forecast U.S. output growth could be improved by two ways: (i) Combining with the Harrod-Domar variable - net saving as a percentage of gross national income - that used to proxy for aggregate supply; and (ii) Using a system of simultaneous equations, in which U.S....

The predictive power of the yield curve slope, or the yield spread is well established in the United States (US) and European Union (EU) countries since 1998. However, there exists a gap in the literature on the predictive power of the yield spread on the Chinese economy. This paper provides a...