Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0 Author-Name: Dr. Thomas Nitschka Author-Name-First: Thomas Author-Name-Last: Nitschka Author-Person: pni214 Title: The Good? The Bad? The Ugly? Which news drive (co)variation in Swiss and US bond and stock excess returns? Abstract: Based on a vector autoregressive model, this paper shows that time variation in monthly excess returns on Swiss government bonds and stocks is predominantly driven by news of inflation and dividends, respectively. This finding is in marked contrast to US evidence which points to a more prominent role of excess return news in this respect. The bond market findings for both Switzerland and the US are consistent with the view that market participants put more weight on news of macroeconomic, i.e. long-term inflation, risks in periods of exceptionally low real interest rates and in crisis periods than in normal times. Length: 39 pages Creation-Date: 2014 Contact-Email: forschung@snb.ch File-URL: https://www.snb.ch/en/publications/research/working-papers/2014/working_paper_2014_01 File-Format: text/html Number: 2014-01 Classification-JEL: E44, G12 Keywords: bond return, news components, stock return, variance decomposition Handle: RePEc:snb:snbwpa:2014-01