forward looking information in var models and the price puzzle abstract with a view to addressing the major disadvantage of the var model namely the inadequate description of the central bank reaction function we propose a var specification that proves successful in solving the price puzzle featuring in monetary vars for the us this specification consists in augmenting a standard var with two forward looking variables the federal funds futures rate or alternatively a money market forward rate reflecting monetary policy expectations and a composite leading indicator of economic activity these two variables appear to effectively control for the information set that the federal reserve may use in monetary policy decision making with this modification theory consistent responses to monetary policy shocks are obtained

monetary policy signaling and movements in the term structure of interest rates this paper examines how various monetary policy signals such as repo rate changes inflation reports speeches and minutes from monetary policy meetings affect the term structure of interest rates we find that unexpected movements in the short end of the yield curve are mainly driven by unexpected changes in the repo rate however published inflation reports and speeches also have some impact on short rates speeches are found to be a more important determinant for the longer end of the term structure our conclusion is that central bank communication is an essential part of the conduct of monetary policy

daily monetary policy shocks and new home sales abstract the conventional notion of a monetary policy shock as a surprise change in the fed funds rate is misspecified the primary news for market participants is not what the fed just did but is instead new information about the fed s future intentions revisions in these anticipations show up instantaneously in long term mortgage rates home sales do not respond until much later this paper attributes this delay and hence much of the hump shaped response of economic activity to monetary policy to cross sectional heterogeneity in search times this framework allows one in principle to measure policy impacts at the daily frequency

interdependency of natural gas network and power system security this paper proposes an integrated model for assessing the impact of interdependency of electricity and natural gas networks on power system security the integrated model incorporates the natural gas network constraints into the optimal solution of security constrained unit commitment the natural gas network is modeled by daily and hourly limits on pipelines sub areas plants and generating units the application of fuel diversity e g generating units with fuel switching capability is presented as an effective peak shaving strategy for natural gas demand which could hedge price volatilities of natural gas and electric power the proposed model can be used by a vertically integrated utility for the commitment and dispatch of generating units and the allocation of natural gas for the next day utilization the proposed model can also be used for measuring the security of social services by modeling the interdependency of natural gas and electric power system infrastructures if the proposed model is used by gencos gas constraints will be submitted to electricity markets as energy constraints illustrative examples show the impact of natural gas supply infrastructure on the economic operation of a vertically integrated utility the examples also discuss the impact of generating units with fuel switching capability on the power system security when the supply of natural gas is limited

monk mortgages in a new keynesian model abstract there has been much interest recently in the role of household long term mortgage debt in the transmission of monetary policy this paper offers a tractable framework that integrates the long term debt channel with the standard new keynesian channel providing a tool for monetary policy analysis that reflects the recent debates in the literature as there is a nontrivial role in the model for both short and long term debt it provides a laboratory to investigate the effects of monetary policy operating not only through its current short term actions but also through expected persistent changes in its stance

do financial indicators have directional predictability for us home sales abstractthis study investigates the directional predictability of financial indicators for home sales across tranquil 1984 2005 and volatile 1972 1983 and 2006 2013 periods we find that the mortgage rate has directional predictability for both existing and newly built home sales for up to 2005 the federal funds rate generally has directional predictability for existing newly built home sales in 1984 2005 1972 1983 the term spread has directional predictability for home sales in 1972 1983 but generally not in the tranquil period of 1984 2005 further unlike mortgage and federal funds rates the term spread has directional predictability for home sales in 2006 2013 and thus can help the fed with useful information assuming that this trend continues

futures prices as risk adjusted forecasts of monetary policy many researchers have used federal funds futures rates as measures of financial markets expectations of future monetary policy however to the extent that federal funds futures reflect risk premia these measures require some adjustment in this paper we document that excess returns on federal funds futures have been positive on average and strongly countercyclical in particular excess returns are surprisingly well predicted by macroeconomic indicators such as employment growth and financial business cycle indicators such as treasury yield spreads and corporate bond spreads excess returns on eurodollar futures display similar patterns we document that simply ignoring these risk premia significantly biases forecasts of the future path of monetary policy we also show that risk premia matter for some futures based measures of monetary policy shocks used in the literature

monetary policy news in the us effects on emerging market capital flows abstract we examine the impact of us monetary policy news on portfolio flows to emerging markets using a bayesian vectorautoregression that accounts for expectations of future monetary policy we define the us monetary policy news shock as one that increases monetary policy expectations while leaving the policy rate unchanged results suggest that the impact of this shock on portfolio flows as a share of gdp is economically small on aggregate but varies considerably across countries the countries we identify as being the most affected also experienced larger volumes of capital in and outflows before and after the 2013 taper tantrum episode respectively also macroeconomic performance and external vulnerabilities may matter however financial openness does not seem to be associated with differences in effects on capital flows over our sample period

genco s risk based maintenance outage scheduling this paper presents a stochastic model for the optimal risk based generation maintenance outage scheduling based on hourly price based unit commitment in a generation company genco such maintenance outage schedules will be submitted by gencos to the iso for approval before implementation the objective of a genco is to consider financial risks when scheduling its midterm maintenance outages the genco also coordinates its proposed outage scheduling with short term unit commitment for maximizing payoffs the proposed model is a stochastic mixed integer linear program in which random hourly prices of energy ancillary services and fuel are modeled as scenarios in the monte carlo method financial risks associated with price uncertainty are considered by applying expected downside risks which are incorporated explicitly as constraints this paper shows that gencos could decrease financial risks by adjusting expected payoffs illustrative examples show the calculation of genco s midterm generation maintenance schedule risk level hourly unit commitment and hourly dispatch for bidding into energy and ancillary services markets

security constrained unit commitment with ac constraints in a restructured power market the independent system operator iso executes the security constrained unit commitment scuc program to plan a secure and economical hourly generation schedule for the day ahead market this paper introduces an efficient scuc approach with ac constraints that obtains the minimum system operating cost while maintaining the security of power systems the proposed approach applies the benders decomposition for separating the unit commitment uc in the master problem from the network security check in subproblems the master problem applies the augmented lagrangian relaxation lr method and dynamic programming dp to solve uc the subproblem checks ac network security constraints for the uc solution to determine whether a converged and secure ac power flow can be obtained if any network violations arise corresponding benders cuts will be formed and added to the master problem for solving the next iteration of uc the iterative process will continue until ac violations are eliminated and a converged optimal solution is found in this paper a six bus system and the ieee 118 bus system with 54 units are analyzed to exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed approach

the effect of interest rates on home buying evidence from a shock to mortgage insurance premiums abstract regression discontinuity estimates indicate that home buying is highly responsive to interest rates in a large segment of the population a surprise 50 basis point cut in the effective interest rate for mortgages insured by the federal housing administration fha led to an immediate 14 percent increase in home buying among the fha reliant population we show that this large extensive margin effect arises from the rate cut helping borrowers overcome maximum debt payment to income dti thresholds we conclude that binding dti constraints are an important feature of the mortgage market that amplify the effect of interest rate shocks

explaining social policy preferences evidence from the great recession to what extent do personal circumstances as compared to ideological dispositions drive voters preferences on welfare policy addressing this question is difficult because a person s ideological position can be an outcome of material interest rather than an independent source of preferences the article deals with this empirical challenge using an original panel study carried out over four years tracking the labor market experiences and the political attitudes of a national sample of americans before and after the eruption of the financial crisis the analysis shows that the personal experience of economic hardship particularly the loss of a job had a major effect on increasing support for welfare spending this effect was appreciably larger among republicans than among democrats a result that was not simply due to a ceiling effect however the large attitudinal shift was short lived dissipating as individuals employment situations improved the results indicate that the personal experience of an economic shock has a sizable yet overall transient effect on voters social policy preferences

the political economy of ownership housing markets and the welfare state the major economic story of the last decade has been the surge and collapse of house prices worldwide yet political economists have had little to say about how this critical phenomenon affects citizens welfare and their demands from government this article develops a novel theoretical argument linking housing prices to social policy preferences and policy outcomes i argue that homeowners experiencing house price appreciation will become less supportive of redistribution and social insurance policies since increased house prices both increase individuals permanent income and the value of housing as self supplied insurance against income loss political parties of the right will responding to these preferences cut social spending substantially during housing booms i test these propositions using both microdata on social preferences from panel surveys in the usa the uk and a cross country survey of 29 countries and macrodata of national social spending for 18 countries between 1975 and 2001

monetary policy surprises and interest rates evidence from the fed funds futures market abstract this paper estimates the impact of monetary policy actions on bill note and bond yields using data from the futures market for federal funds to separate changes in the target funds rate into anticipated and unanticipated components interest rates response to anticipated target rate changes is small while their response to unanticipated changes is large and highly significant these responses are generally consistent with the expectations hypothesis of the term structure surprise target rate changes have little effect on expectations of future actions however which helps to explain the lack of empirical support for the expectations hypothesis at the short end of the yield curve

the fed and interest rates a high frequency identification we measure monetary policy shocks as changes in the fed funds target rate that surprise bond markets in daily data these shock series avoid the omitted variable time varying parameter and orthogonalization problem of monthly vars and do not impose the expectations hypothesis we find surprisingly large and persistent responses of bond yields to these shocks 10 year rates rise as much as 8 10 of a percent to a one percent target shock the usual view that monetary policy only temporarily raises long term rates and influences inflation would lead one to predict a negative long rate response this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

exercise of market power on ramp rate in wind integrated power systems with an increasing penetration of wind power there is likely to be an increasing need for fast ramping generating units these generators ensure that no load is lost if supply drops due to the uncertainties in wind power generation however it is observed in practice that in a presence of network constraints fast ramping generating units are prone to act strategically and exercise market power by withholding their ramp rates in this paper we model this gaming behavior on ramp rates we assume a market operator who collects bids in form of marginal costs quantities and ramp rates he runs a ramp constrained economic dispatch given the generators bids forecasted demand and contingencies following the game theoretic concepts we set up a multi level optimization problem the lower level problem is the ramp constrained economic dispatch and the higher level represents the profit maximization problems solved by strategic generators the whole problem is formulated as an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints epec the outcome of the epec problem is a set of nash equilibria to tackle the multiple nash equilibria problem the concept of the extremal nash equilibria is defined and formulated we model the concept of extremal nash equilibria as a single stage mixed integer linear programming problem milp and demonstrate the application of this mathematical framework on an illustrative case and on a more realistic case study with tractable results

daily changes in fed funds futures prices this paper explores the properties of daily changes in the prices for near term fed funds futures contracts the paper finds these contracts to be excellent predictors of the fed funds rate and shows that the claim of a nonzero term premium in the short horizon contracts is more sensitive to outliers than previous research appears to have recognized i find some statistically significant evidence of serial correlation in the daily changes but this accounts for only a tiny part of the 1 day movements and there is essentially zero predictability for horizons longer than 1 day settlement futures prices for each day appear to incorporate the information embodied in that day s term structure of longer horizon treasury securities previous employment growth makes a statistically significant contribution to predicting futures price changes though again this could only account for a tiny part of the daily variance the paper concludes that futures prices provide a very useful measure of the daily changes in the market s expectation of near term changes in fed policy

monetary policy housing rents and inflation dynamics in this paper we study the effect of monetary policy shocks on housing rents our main finding is that in contrast to house prices housing rents increase in response to contractionary monetary policy shocks we also find that after a contractionary monetary policy shock rental vacancies and the homeownership rate decline this combination of results suggests that monetary policy may affect housing tenure decisions own versus rent in addition we show that with the exception of the shelter component all other main components of the consumer price index cpi either decline in response to a contractionary monetary policy shock or are not responsive these findings motivated us to study the statistical properties of alternative measures of inflation that exclude the shelter component we find that measures of inflation that exclude shelter have most of the statistical properties of the widely used measures of inflation such as the cpi and the price index for personal consumption expenditures but have higher standard deviations and react more to monetary policy shocks finally we show that the response of housing rents accounts for a large proportion of the price puzzle found in the literature

identifying vars based on high frequency futures data abstract using the prices of federal funds futures contracts we measure the impact of the surprise component of federal reserve policy decisions on the expected future trajectory of interest rates we show how this information can be used to identify the effects of a monetary policy shock in a standard var this alternative approach to identification is quite different and we argue more plausible than the conventional identifying restrictions we find that a usual recursive identification of the model is rejected as is any identification that insists on a monetary policy shock having an exactly zero effect on prices contemporaneously we nevertheless agree with the conclusion of much of the var literature that only a small fraction of the variance of output can be attributed to monetary policy shocks

what are the macroeconomic effects of high frequency uncertainty shocks this paper evaluates the effects of high frequency uncertainty shocks on a set of low frequency macroeconomic variables that are representative of the u s economy rather than estimating models at the same common low frequency we use recently developed econometric models which allows us to deal with data of different sampling frequencies

security constrained unit commitment for simultaneous clearing of energy and ancillary services markets this paper introduces a security constrained unit commitment scuc model with emphases on the simultaneous optimization of energy and ancillary services markets benders decomposition is used to decouple the scuc into a unit commitment uc master problem and hourly network security checking subproblems lagrangian relaxation is used to decouple the uc problem into individual single unit commitment problems dynamic programming is used to find the optimal commitment decision a simultaneous marginal curve algorithm is proposed to find the optimal values of energy and ancillary services a six bus system with three units and the ieee 118 bus system with 54 units are analyzed to illustrate the proposed model

do measures of monetary policy in a var make sense a reply to christopher a sims using the estimated var system one can trace out how monetary policy innovations affect the economy as john cochrane 1996 p 1 notes this literature has at last produced impulse response functions that capture common views about monetary policy for example in finding that a positive innovation to monetary policy is followed by increases in output prices and money and by a decline in the short term nominal interest rate in addition despite ongoing debates about precisely how the policy innovation should be identified the estimated responses of key macroeconomic variables to a policy shock are reasonably similar across a variety of studies and suggest that monetary policy shocks can have significant and persistent real effects

a cooperative multi area optimization with renewable generation and storage devices with the rising number of intermittent renewable energy sources and growing energy demand transfer capabilities are very close to their limits consequently redispatch events occur more frequently and flexibility of conventional generation and storage devices will become increasingly important the cooperative multi area optimization strategy presented here enables transmission system operators tsos to dispatch redispatch interconnected networks securely while reducing dispatch redispatch costs schedules for storage devices conventional and renewable generation are obtained considering network constraints and ramping rates an optimal schedule for several control areas is attained including storage operation to achieve congestion relief the distributed approach preserves control area responsibilities all participating control areas attain a schedule close to the global optimum tsos implement agreements to share resulting profits the functionality was shown successfully using stressed 14 and 118 node systems a cross border dispatch with use of storage devices is realized to maintain a high share of renewable energy source res feed in while reducing overall dispatch costs

market based measures of monetary policy expectations a number of recent articles have used different financial market instruments to measure near term expectations of the federal funds rate and the high frequency changes in these instruments around federal open market committee announcements to measure monetary policy shocks this article evaluates the empirical success of a variety of financial market instruments in predicting the future path of monetary policy all of the instruments we consider provide forecasts that are clearly superior to those of standard time series models at all of the horizons considered among financial market instruments we find that federal funds futures dominate all the other securities in forecasting monetary policy at horizons out to six months for longer horizons the predictive power of many of the instruments we consider is very similar in addition we present evidence that monetary policy shocks computed using the current month federal funds futures contract are influenced by changes in the timing of policy actions tha

the political economy of the us mortgage default crisis we examine the effects of constituents special interests and ideology on congressional voting on two of the most significant pieces of legislation in us economic history representatives whose constituents experience a sharp increase in mortgage defaults are more likely to support the foreclosure prevention act especially in competitive districts interestingly representatives are more sensitive to defaults of their own party constituents special interests in the form ofhigher campaign contributions from the financial industry increase the likelihood of supporting the emergency economic stabilization act however ideologically conservative representatives are less responsive to both constituent and special interests jel d72 g21 g28

do measures of monetary policy in a var make sense no in many vector autoregressions vars monetary policy shocks are identified with the least squares residuals from a regression of the federal funds rate on an assortment of variables such regressions appear to be structurally fragile and are at odds with other evidence on the nature of the u s federal reserve s reaction function furthermore the residuals from these regressions show little correlation across various vars or with funds rate shocks that are derived from forward looking financial markets my results provide a sharp critique of current monetary vars

do high frequency stock market data help forecast crude oil prices evidence from the midas models abstract extensive studies have used stock market information to forecast crude oil prices and stock market can more easily derive high frequency data than crude oil market due to no revisions which raises a question that whether high frequency stock market data can improve the forecast performance of crude oil prices therefore this paper employs the midas model and the high frequency data of four stock market indices to forecast wti and brent crude oil prices at lower frequency the results indicate that the high frequency stock market indices have certain advantage over the lower frequency data in forecasting monthly crude oil prices and the midas model using high frequency data proves superior to the ordinary model

conventional monetary policy transmission during financial crises an empirical analysis summary this paper studies the effects of a conventional monetary policy shock in the usa during times of high financial stress the analysis is carried out by introducing a smooth transition factor model where the transition between states normal and high financial stress depends on a financial conditions index employing a quarterly dataset over the period 1970 q1 to 2008 q4 containing 108 us macroeconomic and financial time series i find that a monetary policy shock during periods of high financial stress has stronger and more persistent effects on macroeconomic variables such as output consumption and investment than it has during normal times differences in effects among the regimes seem to originate from nonlinearities in both components of the credit channel i e the balance sheet channel and the bank lending channel copyright 2016 john wiley sons ltd

optimal strategies for multiple participants in electricity markets this letter presents the solution framework for calculating multi participant nash equilibria in a transmission constrained electricity market the proposed framework which is generally applicable to various gaming conditions in electricity markets is used here for non cooperative complete information game between market participants with discrete bidding strategies the example in this letter shows the effectiveness of the proposed framework in finding the nash equilibrium

security constrained optimal coordination of generation and transmission maintenance outage scheduling the proposed approach to the optimal coordination of midterm planning can be used by vertically integrated utilities as well as the isos in electricity markets the approach coordinates the optimal maintenance scheduling of generating units and transmission lines within the outage scheduling horizon of weeks to months with the security constrained unit commitment of available components the proposed model provides hourly schedules for maintenance outages generation unit commitment and transmission flows based on hourly load curves in addition the approach calculates the optimal allocation of fuel and emission allowance for thermal units in a vertically integrated utility and energy allocation in electricity markets this paper discusses that a seamless coordination of midterm and short term optimization schemes will effectively improve the security of electricity services and reduce the chance of blackouts in aging power systems the proposed approach highlights a trade off between calculation speed and accuracy for large scale implementations a six bus system is used for detailed analyses and further results presented for the ieee 118 system exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed midterm planning approach

infrequent housing adjustment limited participation and monetary policy this paper asks why monetary contractions have strong effects on the housing market the paper presents a model with staggered housing adjustment in which monetary policy has real effects in the absence of any rigidity in producer pricing or wages limited participation in financial markets leads to a rise in the real mortgage rate following an increase in the nominal short rate since households must take on a mortgage to consume housing the rise in the real interest rate reduces the share of residential investment in output

measuring the diffusion of housing prices across space and over time how fast and how long and to what magnitude does a change in housing prices in one region affect its neighbors in this paper i apply a time series technique for measuring impulse response functions from local projections to a spatial autoregressive model of housing prices for a dynamic panel of california counties the data reveal that the diffusion of regional housing prices across space lasts up to two and half years this result and the econometric techniques employed should be of interest not only to housing and regional economists but to a variety of applied econometricians as well copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

is housing the business cycle evidence from us cities abstract in a recent paper leamer 2007 identified housing as an important precursor of the national business cycle previous work on the other hand has shown that regional cycles may not be synchronous with the aggregate cycle in this paper we analyze the relationship between housing and the business cycle at the msa level for a set of 51 us cities we find that declines in house prices are often not followed by declines in that city s employment while the growth rates in housing variables appeared to slow ahead of city level peaks we find no consistent statistical relationship suggesting a city s permits or prices influences its business cycle in fact we find that national permits are a better leading indicator for a city s employment than a city s own permits this suggest the possibility that housing is merely a proxy for other consumption or wealth indicators