Paul Söderlind

We ask whether verbal interventions by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) affected market beliefs in the desired direction during the period from 2011 to 2015, when the SNB imposed a cap on the Swiss franc at 1.20 against the euro. A verbal intervention was a speech by a member of the SNB Governing Board containing the wording “utmost determination” and/or “unlimited quantities”. We show that these verbal interventions lowered forward-looking measures of uncertainty regarding the future value of euro/Swiss franc exchange rate and steered market beliefs toward franc depreciation, therefore reinforcing the credibility of the Swiss franc cap

We examine the daily activity and performance of a large panel of individual investors in Sweden's Premium Pension System. We find that active investors earn higher returns and risk-adjusted returns than inactive investors. A performance decomposition analysis reveals that most of the outperformance of active investors is the result of these investors successfully timing mutual funds and asset classes. While activity is beneficial for some investors, extreme flows out of mutual funds affect funds' net asset values negatively for all investors. Financial advisors, by contributing to coordinate investments and redemptions, exacerbate these negative effects.

We provide a comprehensive study of the liquidity of spot foreign exchange (FX) rates over more than two decades and a large cross-section of currencies. First, we show that FX liquidity can be accurately measured with daily and readily available data. Second, we demonstrate that FX liquidity declines with funding constraints and global risk, supporting theoretical models relating funding and market liquidity. In these distressed circumstances, liquidity tends to evaporate more for developed and riskier currencies. Finally, we show stronger comovements of FX liquidities in distressed markets, especially when funding is constrained, volatility is high, and FX speculators incur losses.

We explain the currency carry trade (CT) performance using an asset pricing model in which factor loadings are regime dependent rather than constant. Empirical results show that a typical CT strategy has much higher exposure to the stock market and is mean reverting in regimes of high foreign exchange volatility. The findings are robust to various extensions. Our regime-dependent pricing model provides significantly smaller pricing errors than a traditional model. Thus, the CT performance is better explained by a time-varying systematic risk that increases in volatile markets, suggesting a partial resolution of the uncovered interest parity puzzle.

The difference between nominal and real interest rates (break-even inflation) is often used to gauge the market's inflation expectations-and has become an important tool in monetary policy analysis. However, break-even inflation can move in response to shifts in inflation risk premia and liquidity premia as well as to changes in expected inflation. This paper sheds light on this issue by analyzing the evolution of U.S. break-even inflation from 1997 to mid-2008. Regression results show that survey data on inflation uncertainty and proxies for liquidity premia are important factors.

We study high-frequency exchange rates over the period 1993-2008. Based on the recent literature on volatility and liquidity risk premia, we use a factor model to capture linear and non-linear linkages between currencies, stock and bond markets as well as proxies for market volatility and liquidity. We document that the Swiss franc and Japanese yen appreciate against the US dollar when US stock prices decrease and US bond prices and FX volatility increase. These safe haven properties materialise over different time granularities (from a few hours to several days) and non-linearly with the volatility factor and during crises. The latter effects were particularly discernible for the yen during the recent financial crisis.

The forecasting performance of the Livingston survey and traditional prediction models of stock prices is analysed. The survey forecasts look similar to those from a ‘too large' prediction model: poor out-of-sample performance and too sensitive to recent and irrelevant information.

An affine yield curve model is estimated on daily Swiss data 2002-2009. The market price of risk is modelled in terms of proxies for uncertainty, which are estimated from interest rate options. The estimated model generates innovations in the 3-month rate that are similar to external evidence of monetary policy surprises - as well as term premia that are consistent with survey data. The results indicate that a surprise increase in the policy rate gives a reasonably sized decrease (-0.25%) in term premia for longer maturities.

Stein's lemma is extended to the case where asset returns have skewed and leptokurtic distributions. The risk premium is still the negative of the covariance of the excess return with the log stochastic discount factor. The risk-neutral distribution has a simple form but is a nontrivial transformation of the physical distribution.