FINANCIAL MARKETS AND THE MACRO ECONOMY

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to provide a deeper insight into the links between financial markets and the real economy. To that end, we study the short-term anticipation and response of U.S. stock, Treasury, and corporate bond markets to the first release of U.S. macroeconomic information. Specifically, we focus on the impact of these announcements not only on the level, but also on the volatility and comovement of those assets’ returns. For that purpose, we estimate several extensions of the parsimonious amended GARCH model of Engle (2002) for the excess holding-period returns on seven portfolios of these asset classes. We find that the process of price formation in the U.S. financial markets appears to be driven by fundamentals; yet, “excessive” volatility and comovement play an important role in return dynamics as well. Further, our analysis reveals a statistically and economically significant dichotomy between the reaction of the stock and bond markets to the arrival of unexpected fundamental information. However, we also show that stock and bond returns tend to react to the expected component of these announcements. This evidence casts some doubts on the efficiency of the U.S. financial markets with respect to widely anticipated and tracked releases of macroeconomic data. Overall, the above results often differ from earlier studies where the surprise portion of those releases was not identified, and shed new light on the mechanisms by which information is incorporated into prices.