The paper uses a reduced-form vector autoregressive framework to study the effects of quantitative easing and operation “twist”, as well as a conventional monetary expansion, on corporate bond yields and spreads. We construct rating- and maturity-based weekly bond portfolios using TRACE and...

This paper systematically investigates the sources of differential out-of-sample predictive accuracy of heuristic frameworks based on internet search frequencies and a large set of econometric models. The volume of internet searches helps gauge the degree of investors' time-varying interest in...

We examine the effects of U.S. monetary policy announcements during and after the Great Financial Crisis on the average abnormal returns (the “alpha”) of the hedge fund industry as a whole and of a range of hedge strategy indices. We apply a variety of tests of increasing sophistication...

We test whether three well-known commodity-specific variables (basis, hedgingpressure, and momentum) may improve the predictive power for commodity futuresreturns of models otherwise based on macroeconomic factors. We compute recursive,out-of-sample forecasts for fifteen monthly commodity...

We use monthly data on the US riskless yield curve for a 1982-2015 sample to show that mixing simple regime switching dynamics with Nelson-Siegel factor forecasts from time series models extended to encompass variables that summarize the state of monetary policy, leads to superior predictive...