Economic News and Colombian Sovereign Bonds

Abstract

This paper analyses the effect of surprises in local and international economic news on the Colombian local-currency government bond market. In this study, we categorize the different government bond issues into three constant-duration portfolios to correct for mismatching maturities among different Colombian bond issues. We use quantile regression to model the effect of the surprise component on portfolio returns, since this method is robust to asymmetry, and to the presence of heavy tails in the distribution of the data. Under the assumption of inflation expectations, our results found that in the short term, international news has a greater effect than similar domestic news items, but this is not the case for longer maturities; the only exception to the surprise component of US unemployment.

Keywords: Economic news, Bond Market, US news, Colombia

JEL Classification: G14, G15