Asset pricing

• What Fed Funds Futures Tell Us About Monetary Policy Uncertainty

  Staff Working Paper 2016-61 Jean-Sébastien Fontaine

  The uncertainty around future changes to the Federal Reserve target rate varies over time. In our results, the main driver of uncertainty is a “path” factor signaling information about future policy actions, which is filtered from federal funds futures data.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Financial markets, Interest rates JEL Code(s): E, E4, E43, E44, E47, G, G1, G12, G13

• Equity Option-Implied Probability of Default and Equity Recovery Rate

  Staff Working Paper 2016-58 Bo Young Chang, Greg Orosi

  There is a close link between prices of equity options and the default probability of a firm. We show that in the presence of positive expected equity recovery, standard methods that assume zero equity recovery at default misestimate the option-implied default probability.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Financial markets, Market structure and pricing JEL Code(s): G, G1, G13, G3, G33

• On the Value of Virtual Currencies

  Staff Working Paper 2016-42 Wilko Bolt, Maarten van Oordt

  This paper develops an economic framework to analyze the exchange rate of virtual currency. Three components are important: first, the current use of virtual currency to make payments; second, the decision of forward-looking investors to buy virtual currency (thereby effectively regulating its supply); and third, the elements that jointly drive future consumer adoption and merchant acceptance of virtual currency.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Digital currencies and fintech, Exchange rates JEL Code(s): E, E4, E42, E5, E51, F, F3, F31, G, G1

• Time-Varying Crash Risk: The Role of Stock Market Liquidity

  Staff Working Paper 2016-35 Peter Christoffersen, Bruno Feunou, Yoontae Jeon, Chayawat Ornthanalai

  We estimate a continuous-time model with stochastic volatility and dynamic crash probability for the S&P 500 index and find that market illiquidity dominates other factors in explaining the stock market crash risk. While the crash probability is time-varying, its dynamic depends only weakly on return variance once we include market illiquidity as an economic variable in the model.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Econometric and statistical methods, Financial stability JEL Code(s): G, G0, G01, G1, G12

• Global Macro Risks in Currency Excess Returns

  Staff Working Paper 2016-32 Kimberly Berg, Nelson C. Mark

  We study a cross section of carry-trade-generated currency excess returns in terms of their exposure to global fundamental macroeconomic risk.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Exchange rates, Interest rates JEL Code(s): E, E2, E21, E4, E43, F, F3, F31, G, G1, G12