Is the Intrinsic Value of Macroeconomic News Announcements Related to Their Asset Price Impact?

FEDS Working Paper No. 2015-046

http://dx.doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2015.046

51 Pages Posted: 9 Jul 2015

See all articles by Thomas Gilbert

Thomas Gilbert

University of Washington - Department of Finance and Business Economics

Chiara Scotti

Bank of Italy

Georg Strasser

European Central Bank (ECB) - Directorate General Research

Clara Vega

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Multiple version iconThere are 4 versions of this paper

Date Written: April 23, 2015

Abstract

The literature documents a heterogeneous asset price response to macroeconomic news announcements: Some announcements have a strong impact on asset prices and others do not. In order to explain these differences, we estimate a novel measure of the intrinsic value of a macroeconomic announcement, which we define as the announcement's ability to nowcast GDP growth, inflation, and the Federal Funds Target Rate. Using the same nowcasting framework, we then decompose this intrinsic value into the announcement's characteristics: its relation to fundamentals, timing, and revision noise. We find that in the 1998-2013 period, a significant fraction of the variation in the announcements' price impact on the Treasury bond futures market can be explained by differences in intrinsic value. Furthermore, our novel measure of timing explains significantly more of this variation than the announcements' relation to fundamentals, reporting lag (which previous studies have used as a measure of timing), or revision noise.

Keywords: Macroeconomic announcements, central bank policy, coordination role of public information, learning, macroeconomic forecasting, price discovery

JEL Classification: E44, G14

Suggested Citation

Gilbert, Thomas and Scotti, Chiara and Strasser, Georg H. and Vega, Clara, Is the Intrinsic Value of Macroeconomic News Announcements Related to Their Asset Price Impact? (April 23, 2015). FEDS Working Paper No. 2015-046, http://dx.doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2015.046, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2628269 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2628269

Thomas Gilbert

University of Washington - Department of Finance and Business Economics ( email )

Box 353200
Seattle, WA 98195
United States
206-616-7184 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://faculty.washington.edu/gilbertt/

Chiara Scotti (Contact Author)

Bank of Italy ( email )

Via Nazionale 91
Rome, 00184
Italy

Georg H. Strasser

European Central Bank (ECB) - Directorate General Research ( email )

Sonnemannstraße 20
Frankfurt am Main, 60314
Germany
+496913441416 (Phone)

Clara Vega

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System ( email )

20th Street and Constitution Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20551
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.federalreserve.gov/research/staff/vegaclarax.htm

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
99
Abstract Views
1,421
Rank
105,496
PlumX Metrics