IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/jfutmk/v25y2005i12p1203-1242.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Recovering market expectations of FOMC rate changes with options on federal funds futures

Author

Listed:
  • John B. Carlson
  • Ben R. Craig
  • William R. Melick

Abstract

This article demonstrates how options on federal funds futures, which began trading in March 2003, can be used to recover the implied probability density function (PDF) for future Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) interest‐rate outcomes. The discrete nature of the choices made by the FOMC allows for a very straightforward recovery of the implied PDF using ordinary‐least‐squares (OLS) estimation. This simple recovery method stands in contrast to the relatively complicated PDF recovery techniques developed for options written on assets such as equities, foreign exchange, or commodity futures, where the underlying prices are most appropriately modeled as being drawn from continuous distributions. The OLS estimation is used to recover PDFs for single FOMC meetings as well as PDFs for joint estimation of multiple FOMC meetings, and allows for the imposition of restrictions on the recovered probabilities, both within and across FOMC meetings. Finally, recovered probabilities are used to assess the impact of data releases and Fed communication on the perceived likelihood of actual policy outcomes. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 25:1203–1242, 2005

Suggested Citation

  • John B. Carlson & Ben R. Craig & William R. Melick, 2005. "Recovering market expectations of FOMC rate changes with options on federal funds futures," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(12), pages 1203-1242, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:jfutmk:v:25:y:2005:i:12:p:1203-1242
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Piazzesi, Monika & Swanson, Eric T., 2008. "Futures prices as risk-adjusted forecasts of monetary policy," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(4), pages 677-691, May.
    2. Robertson, John C & Tallman, Ellis W, 2001. "Improving Federal-Funds Rate Forecasts in VAR Models Used for Policy Analysis," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 19(3), pages 324-330, July.
    3. Rudebusch, Glenn D., 1995. "Federal Reserve interest rate targeting, rational expectations, and the term structure," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 245-274, April.
    4. Stephen Bond & Frank Windmeijer, 2005. "Reliable Inference For Gmm Estimators? Finite Sample Properties Of Alternative Test Procedures In Linear Panel Data Models," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 24(1), pages 1-37.
    5. Hu, Ling & Phillips, Peter C. B., 2004. "Nonstationary discrete choice," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 120(1), pages 103-138, May.
    6. Breeden, Douglas T & Litzenberger, Robert H, 1978. "Prices of State-contingent Claims Implicit in Option Prices," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 51(4), pages 621-651, October.
    7. Eric T. Swanson, 2004. "Federal Reserve transparency and financial market forecasts of short-term interest rates," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2004-06, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    8. Ed Nosal, 2001. "How well does the federal funds futures rate predict the future federal funds rate?," Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, issue Oct.
    9. Melick, William R. & Thomas, Charles P., 1997. "Recovering an Asset's Implied PDF from Option Prices: An Application to Crude Oil during the Gulf Crisis," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 32(1), pages 91-115, March.
    10. Robert R. Bliss & Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, 2004. "Option-Implied Risk Aversion Estimates," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 59(1), pages 407-446, February.
    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. Jahangir Sultan, 2012. "Options on federal funds futures and interest rate volatility," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 32(4), pages 330-359, April.
    2. John C. Williams, 2009. "Heeding Daedalus: Optimal Inflation and the Zero Lower Bound," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 40(2 (Fall)), pages 1-49.
    3. Jukka Sihvonen & Sami Vähämaa, 2014. "Forward‐Looking Monetary Policy Rules and Option‐Implied Interest Rate Expectations," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 34(4), pages 346-373, April.
    4. Chen, Zhengyang, 2019. "The Long-term Rate and Interest Rate Volatility in Monetary Policy Transmission," EconStor Preprints 204579, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    5. Husted, Lucas & Rogers, John & Sun, Bo, 2020. "Monetary policy uncertainty," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 20-36.
    6. Renne, Jean-Paul, 2016. "A tractable interest rate model with explicit monetary policy rates," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 251(3), pages 873-887.
    7. Amine Bouden, 2008. "The Behavior Of The Implied Volatility Surface: Evidence From Crude Oil Futures Options," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Mondher Bellalah & Jean-Luc Prigent & Jean-Michel Sahut & Georges Pariente & Olivier Levyne & Michel (ed.),Risk Management And Value Valuation and Asset Pricing, chapter 8, pages 151-175, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    8. Bo Young Chang & Bruno Feunou, 2013. "Measuring Uncertainty in Monetary Policy Using Implied Volatility and Realized Volatility," Staff Working Papers 13-37, Bank of Canada.
    9. Maarten van Oordt, 2017. "Which Model to Forecast the Target Rate?," Staff Working Papers 17-60, Bank of Canada.
    10. Roberto Casarin & Fabrizio Leisen & German Molina & Enrique ter Horst, 2014. "A Bayesian Beta Markov Random Field Calibration of the Term Structure of Implied Risk Neutral Densities," Papers 1409.1956, arXiv.org.
    11. William R. Emmons & Aeimit K. Lakdawala & Christopher J. Neely, 2006. "What are the odds? option-based forecasts of FOMC target changes," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 88(Nov), pages 543-562.
    12. Nikolay Gospodinov & Ibrahim Jamali, 2018. "Monetary policy uncertainty, positions of traders and changes in commodity futures prices," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 24(2), pages 239-260, March.
    13. Zhengyang Chen, 2019. "The Long-term Rate and Interest Rate Volatility in Monetary Policy Transmission," 2019 Papers pch1858, Job Market Papers.

    More about this item

    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:wly:jfutmk:v:25:y:2005:i:12:p:1203-1242. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Wiley Content Delivery). General contact details of provider: http://www.interscience.wiley.com/jpages/0270-7314/ .

    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 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.