Interest Rate Skewness and Biased Beliefs

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Event details

Date 13.05.2022
Hour 10:3012:00
Speaker Michael Bauer, Universität Hamburg
Location
UniL Campus, Extra 126
Category Conferences - Seminars
Event Language English

The conditional skewness of Treasury yields is an important indicator of the risks to the macroeconomic outlook. Positive skewness signals upside risk to interest rates during periods of accommodative monetary policy and an upward-sloping yield curve, and vice versa. Skewness has substantial predictive power for future bond excess returns, high-frequency interest rate changes around FOMC announcements, and survey forecast errors for interest rates. The estimated expectational errors, or biases in beliefs, are quantitatively important for statistical bond risk premia. These findings are consistent with a heterogeneous-beliefs model where one of the agents is wrong about consumption growth.

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