Essays on Asset Prices and Macroeconomic News Announcements

Abstract

My dissertation is composed of three chapters that are unified by their exploration of asset prices and macroeconomic news announcements. With respect to asset prices, my main focus is on the price discovery process: how do asset prices reveal information relevant for asset fundamentals? Through my research, I provide new answers to this question. My work gets at core issues in asset pricing: whether financial markets are informationally efficient; why some assets earn unconditionally high premia; and how the sensitivity of prices to information varies over time and across assets. Specifically, chapter one shows evidence that sophisticated traders with an informational advantage inefficiently impound their edge into the aggregate U.S. stock market and U.S. Treasury bonds. In chapter two, I explore a model in which investors are averse to ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty) to explain why the equity premium is concentrated around specific events. Finally, chapter three investigates how the Federal Reserve's zero lower bound affects the response of asset prices, in particular interest rates, to information. Each of the three chapters explores the price discovery process using the unique setting of U.S. macroeconomic news announcements, which are made by government agencies and private-sector organizations and cover macroeconomic data on inflation, output, and unemployment. Analyzing financial markets in this setting deepens our understanding of how asset prices reflect information about macroeconomic fundamentals. At the same time, the results have macroeconomic implications; for example, the assumptions of monetary policy models in theory and the effectiveness of unconventional monetary policy in practice.