Eoin Treacy's view

Fed: “Hedge fund holdings and stock market efficiency” 

We examine the relation between changes in hedge fund stock holdings and measures of informational efficiency of equity prices derived from transactions data, and find that, on average, increased hedge fund ownership leads to significant improvements in the informational efficiency of equity prices. The contribution of hedge funds to price efficiency is greater than the contributions of other types of institutional investors, such as mutual funds or banks. However, stocks held by hedge funds experienced extreme declines in price efficiency during liquidity crises, most notably in the last quarter of 2008, and the declines were most severe in stocks held by hedge funds connected to Lehman Brothers and hedge funds using leverage. 

Fed: “Slow Business Start-ups and the Job Recovery” 

Start-ups typically create jobs so fast at the beginning of recoveries that even a modest drop in that pace can affect the whole economy. In fact, slower job growth among new businesses may have resulted in 760,000 fewer jobs in the first year of the current recovery. Because housing wealth is an important factor in the financing of new businesses, lower house prices may have been partly to blame for the slower growth. Conversely, recently increasing house prices may already be boosting start-up growth and, with it, overall job growth. 

Fed: ” The Energy Boom and Manufacturing in the United States” 

This paper examines the response of U.S. manufacturers to changes in competitiveness brought about by movements in the price of natural gas. I estimate the response of various measures of manufacturing activity using panel regression methods across roughly 80 industries that allow each industry’s response to vary with its energy intensity. These estimates suggest that the fall in the price of natural gas since 2006 is associated with a 2 to 3 percent increase in activity for the entire manufacturing sector, with much larger effects of 30 percent or more for the most energy intensive industries. 

Fed: “Partisan conflict” 

In this paper, I provide a novel high-frequency indicator of the degree of partisan conflict. The index, constructed for the period 1891 to 2013, uses a search-based approach that measures the frequency of newspaper articles that report lawmakers' disagreement about policy. I show that the long-run trend of partisan conflict behaves similarly to political polarization and income inequality, especially since the Great Depression. Its short-run fluctuations are highly related to elections, but unrelated to recessions. The lower-than-average values observed during wars suggest a “rally around the flag" effect. I use the index to study the effect of an increase in partisan conflict, equivalent to the one observed since the Great Recession, on business cycles. Using a simple VAR, I find that an innovation to partisan conflict increases government deficits and significantly discourages investment, output, and employment. Moreover, these declines are persistent, which may help explain the slow recovery observed since the 2007 recession ended. 

Fed: “U.S. Unconventional Monetary Policy and Transmission to Emerging Market Economies” 

We investigate the effects of U.S. unconventional monetary policies on sovereign yields, foreign exchange rates, and stock prices in emerging market economies (EMEs), and we analyze how these effects depend on country-specific characteristics. We find that, although EME asset prices, mainly those of sovereign bonds, responded strongly to unconventional monetary policy announcements, these responses were not outsized with respect to a model that takes into account each country's time-varying vulnera-bility to U.S. interest rates affected by monetary policy shocks. 

Fed: “Households Ease Up on Adding New Debt” 

A key question for the continued economic recovery is whether household deleveraging is over. If households are beginning to add debt to their balance sheets, it may be a sign that consumers’ confidence has returned and consumption might be increasing. 

“Stock Market Predictability: Global Evidence and an Explanation” 

Using a comprehensive dataset covering 34 countries from Datastream, we find that dividend-price ratio has a broad spectrum of forecasting abilities internationally. In some countries, such as the US, the dividend-price ratio is a powerful predictor of exclusively stock returns, whereas in others it is a powerful predictor of exclusively dividend growth rates. For many countries, however, the dividend-price ratio has some predictive power for both stock returns and dividend growth rates, although the relative degree of predictive power differs. We have provided an explanation for these differences in stock market predictabilities between countries. When a firm with a dominant shareholder is publicly traded, then the dominant shareholder determines cash-flow policy but the stochastic discount factor contained in the stock price may reflect the minority shareholders’ stochastic discount factor. For this reason, the correlation between cash-flow and stochastic discount factor approaches zero as the disparity between voting rights and cash-flow rights increases. As a result, the stock price becomes more dependent on expected dividends than expected stock returns, and, therefore, the dividend-price ratio has a stronger predictive power for dividend growth. Consistent with our explanation, we find a strong positive relation between dividend growth predictability and disparity, but a significantly negative one between stock return predictability and disparity. These relations are found to be consistent across various robust tests. 

IMF: “Banks, Government Bonds, and Default: What do the Data Say?” 

We analyze holdings of public bonds by over 20,000 banks in 191 countries, and the role of these bonds in 20 sovereign defaults over 1998-2012. Banks hold many public bonds (on average 9% of their assets), particularly in less financially-developed countries. During sovereign defaults, banks increase their exposure to public bonds, especially large banks and when expected bond returns are high. At the bank level, bondholdings correlate negatively with subsequent lending during sovereign defaults. This correlation is mostly due to bonds acquired in pre-default years. These findings shed light on alternative theories of the sovereign default-banking crisis nexus. 

 Fed: “The Decline of Drudgery and the Paradox of Hard Work” 

We develop a theory that focuses on the general equilibrium and long-run macro-economic consequences of trends in job utility. Given secular increases in job utility, work hours per capita can remain approximately constant over time even if the income effect of higher wages on labor supply exceeds the substitution effect. In addition, secular improvements in job utility can be substantial relative to welfare gains from ordinary technological progress. These two implications are connected by an equation flowing from optimal hours choices: improvements in job utility that have a significant effect on labor supply tend to have large welfare effects.