Stylized facts of asset return predictability are mainly based on evidence from the US, a large, closed economy, and, hence, are not necessarily representative of small, open economies. Furthermore, discountrate news mainly drive US asset returns. This is not the case in other economies. We use Switzerland as example to highlight the importance of these issues and to assess the impact of global risks on the predictability of asset returns of a small, open economy. We find that the forecast ability of the best Swiss predictive variable varies over time. This time variation is linked to global foreign currency risks.
This paper investigates time variation in the dynamics of international portfolio equity flows. We extend the empirical model of Hau and Rey (2004) by embedding a two-state Markov regime-switching model into the structural VAR. The model is estimated using monthly data for the period 1995-2015 on equity returns, exchange rate returns and equity flows between the United States and advanced and emerging economies. We find that the data are consistent with portfolio rebalancing. The estimated states match periods of low and high financial stress. Our main result is that for equity flows between the United States and emerging markets, the rebalancing dynamics differ between high and low episodes of financial stress. A switch from the low to the high stress regime is associated with capital outflows from emerging markets. Once in the high stress regime, the response of capital flows to exchange rate shocks is smaller than in normal (low stress) periods.
This paper studies the transmission of changes in short-term interest rates to longer-term government bond yields when interest rates are at very low levels or negative. We focus on Switzerland, where short-term interest rates have been at zero since late 2008 and negative since the beginning of 2015. The expectations hypothesis of the term structure implies that as nominal interest rates approach their lower bound, the effect of short-term rates on longer-term yields should decline, and positive short rate changes should have larger absolute effects than negative short rate changes. Contrary to studies of other countries, we find no evidence for a decline in the effect of short rate changes for the low-interest rate period using Swiss data. However, we do find evidence for the predicted asymmetric effect for positive and negative short rate changes during the period when short-term rates are close to zero. This asymmetry normalized again after the introduction of negative interest rates.
We derive daily market‐based domestic long‐term inflation expectations for eight countries without inflation swap markets. To do so, we use foreign inflation swaps together with (1) foreign and domestic interest rate swaps assuming that purchasing power parity (PPP) and uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) hold or together with (2) spot and forward exchange rates assuming that PPP, UIP and covered interest rate parity (CIP) hold. We confirm the plausibility of our PPP‐UIP and PPP‐UIC‐CIP measures by also applying these methods for countries with inflation swap markets. We moreover illustrate how the data can be used to answer such questions as whether inflation reacts to long‐term inflation expectations, whether these expectations are well‐anchored and how long‐term real interest rates have moved over the past decade.
We study the transmission of changes in the believed location of the lower bound to longterm interest rates since the introduction of negative interest rate policies. The expectations hypothesis of the term structure combined with a lower bound on policy rates suggests that the transmission of policy rate changes to long-term interest rates is reduced when policy rates approach this lower bound. We show that if market participants revise downward the believed location of the lower bound, this may reduce long-term yields and increase transmission. A cross-country event study suggests that such effects have been empirically relevant during the recent negative interest rate episode.
