IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/feddwp/1008.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Yield spreads as predictors of economic activity: a real-time VAR analysis

Author

Listed:
  • N. Kundan Kishor
  • Evan F. Koenig

Abstract

We undertake a real-time VAR analysis of the usefulness of the term spread, the junk-bond spread, the ISM's New Orders Index, and broker/dealer equity for predicting growth in non-farm employment. To get around the \"apples and oranges\" problem described by Koenig, Dolmas and Piger (2003), we augment each VAR we consider with a flexible state-space model of employment revisions. This methodology produces jobs forecasts consistently superior to those obtained using conventional VAR analysis. They are also superior to Federal Reserve Greenbook forecasts and to median forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. The junk-bond spread is by far the best single predictor of future jobs growth. However, the term spread has some incremental predictive power at medium-to-long horizons. The incremental predictive power of broker/dealer equity, while small, exceeds that of the ISM index at every horizon.

Suggested Citation

  • N. Kundan Kishor & Evan F. Koenig, 2010. "Yield spreads as predictors of economic activity: a real-time VAR analysis," Working Papers 1008, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:feddwp:1008
    Note: Published as: N. Kundan Kishor and Evan F. Koenig (2014), "Credit Indicators as Predictors of Economic Activity: A Real–Time VAR Analysis," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 46 (2-3): 545-564.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/papers/2010/wp1008.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Arturo Estrella & Frederic S. Mishkin, 1998. "Predicting U.S. Recessions: Financial Variables As Leading Indicators," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 80(1), pages 45-61, February.
    2. Ben S. Bernanke & Mark Gertler, 1995. "Inside the Black Box: The Credit Channel of Monetary Policy Transmission," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 9(4), pages 27-48, Fall.
    3. Michael Dotsey, 1998. "The predictive content of the interest rate term spread for future economic growth," Economic Quarterly, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, issue Sum, pages 31-51.
    4. Bernanke, Ben S. & Gertler, Mark & Gilchrist, Simon, 1999. "The financial accelerator in a quantitative business cycle framework," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 21, pages 1341-1393, Elsevier.
    5. Arturo Estrella & Anthony P. Rodrigues & Sebastian Schich, 2003. "How Stable is the Predictive Power of the Yield Curve? Evidence from Germany and the United States," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 85(3), pages 629-644, August.
    6. Tobias Adrian & Hyun Song Shin, 2008. "Financial intermediaries, financial stability and monetary policy," Proceedings - Economic Policy Symposium - Jackson Hole, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pages 287-334.
    7. Menzie Chinn & Kavan Kucko, 2015. "The Predictive Power of the Yield Curve Across Countries and Time," International Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 18(2), pages 129-156, June.
    8. Rudebusch, Glenn D. & Williams, John C., 2009. "Forecasting Recessions: The Puzzle of the Enduring Power of the Yield Curve," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 27(4), pages 492-503.
    9. Estrella, Arturo & Hardouvelis, Gikas A, 1991. "The Term Structure as a Predictor of Real Economic Activity," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 46(2), pages 555-576, June.
    10. Michael Feroli, 2004. "Monetary policy and the information content of the yield spread," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2004-44, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    11. James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 1989. "New Indexes of Coincident and Leading Economic Indicators," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1989, Volume 4, pages 351-409, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Ashoka Mody & Mark P. Taylor, 2003. "The High-Yield Spread as a Predictor of Real Economic Activity: Evidence of a Financial Accelerator for the United States," IMF Staff Papers, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 50(3), pages 1-3.
    13. Feroli Michael, 2004. "Monetary Policy and the Information Content of the Yield Spread," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 4(1), pages 1-17, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. De Pace, Pierangelo & Weber, Kyle D., 2016. "The time-varying leading properties of the high yield spread in the United States," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 203-230.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. De Pace, Pierangelo & Weber, Kyle D., 2016. "The time-varying leading properties of the high yield spread in the United States," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 203-230.
    2. Evgenidis, Anastasios & Papadamou, Stephanos & Siriopoulos, Costas, 2020. "The yield spread's ability to forecast economic activity: What have we learned after 30 years of studies?," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 106(C), pages 221-232.
    3. Ibarra-Ramírez Raúl, 2021. "The Yield Curve as a Predictor of Economic Activity in Mexico: The Role of the Term Premium," Working Papers 2021-07, Banco de México.
    4. B. De Backer & M. Deroose & Ch. Van Nieuwenhuyze, 2019. "Is a recession imminent? The signal of the yield curve," Economic Review, National Bank of Belgium, issue i, pages 69-93, June.
    5. Morell, Joseph, 2018. "The decline in the predictive power of the US term spread: A structural interpretation," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 314-331.
    6. Aguiar-Conraria, Luís & Martins, Manuel M.F. & Soares, Maria Joana, 2012. "The yield curve and the macro-economy across time and frequencies," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 36(12), pages 1950-1970.
    7. Gebka, Bartosz & Wohar, Mark E., 2018. "The predictive power of the yield spread for future economic expansions: Evidence from a new approach," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 181-195.
    8. Stijn Claessens & M Ayhan Kose, 2018. "Frontiers of macrofinancial linkages," BIS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 95.
    9. Anna Florio, 2016. "The central bank as shaper and observer of events: The case of the yield spread," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 49(1), pages 320-346, February.
    10. Carlo Favero & Iryna Kaminska & Ulf Soderstrom, 2005. "The Predictive Power of the Yield Spread: Further Evidence and a Structural Interpretation," Working Papers 280, IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University.
    11. Hasse, Jean-Baptiste & Lajaunie, Quentin, 2022. "Does the yield curve signal recessions? New evidence from an international panel data analysis," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 9-22.
    12. Shuping Shi & Peter C. B. Phillips & Stan Hurn, 2018. "Change Detection and the Causal Impact of the Yield Curve," Journal of Time Series Analysis, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(6), pages 966-987, November.
    13. Stijn Claessens & M Ayhan Kose, 2017. "Asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes: a survey," BIS Working Papers 676, Bank for International Settlements.
    14. N. Kundan Kishor & Evan F. Koenig, 2014. "Credit Indicators as Predictors of Economic Activity: A Real‐Time VAR Analysis," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 46(2-3), pages 545-564, March.
    15. Vasilios Plakandaras & Juncal Cunado & Rangan Gupta & Mark E. Wohar, 2016. "Do Leading Indicators Forecast U.S. Recessions? A Nonlinear Re-Evaluation Using Historical Data," Working Papers 201685, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics.
    16. Jean-Baptiste Hasse & Quentin Lajaunie, 2020. "Does the Yield Curve Signal Recessions? New Evidence from an International Panel Data Analysis," AMSE Working Papers 2013, Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France.
    17. Ang, Andrew & Piazzesi, Monika & Wei, Min, 2006. "What does the yield curve tell us about GDP growth?," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 131(1-2), pages 359-403.
    18. Deschamps, Bruno & Ioannidis, Christos & Ka, Kook, 2020. "High-frequency credit spread information and macroeconomic forecast revision," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 358-372.
    19. Sun, Jiandong & Feng, Shuaizhang & Hu, Yingyao, 2021. "Misclassification errors in labor force statuses and the early identification of economic recessions," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(C).
    20. Fernandez-Perez, Adrian & Fernández-Rodríguez, Fernando & Sosvilla-Rivero, Simón, 2014. "The term structure of interest rates as predictor of stock returns: Evidence for the IBEX 35 during a bear market," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 21-33.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Employment forecasting; Asset pricing;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:feddwp:1008. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Amy Chapman (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbdaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.