Daniel Nathan

I am a Research Economist at the Monetary Department at the Bank of Israel. I am also a fifth year PhD student at Tel-Aviv University. My PhD supervisor is Prof. Avi Wohl.

Research Economist

2008 - Present · Bank of Israel

Economist at the Monetary Division

2007 - 2008 · Bank of Israel

Ph.D. Candidate

2015 - present · Tel-Aviv University

Working Papers

In March 2020, government bond markets experienced severe illiquidity. Since then, regulators debate market reforms. One way to enhance liquidity could be to let government bonds, like stocks, be traded on central exchanges. We assess this reform with price data of the U.S, U.K., German, Japanese, and Israeli government bond and stock markets. We leverage a unique institutional feature of the Israeli government bond market—that it already operates on an exchange—to test whether and by how much having an exchange affected bid-ask spreads in March 2020 via difference-in-difference analyses. Our findings suggest that spreads in government bond markets without exchanges would have been 30%–60% lower if there had been an exchange. This implies higher liquidity and provides support in favor of the market reform.

Presented at: CEBRA 2021. 16th Central Bank Conference on the Microstructure of Financial Markets.

We investigate daily flows to Israeli mutual funds, which are held primarily by retail investors. We find that daily net flows are contemporaneously correlated with price changes of all government bond categories (nominal/CPI-linked; short-term, intermediate-term, and long-term maturity). These price changes are subsequently reversed fully or partially within three months. The price reversals indicate that the initial price changes are due to “noise”. We find that these price distortions affect break-even inflation – a popular measure of inflation expectations. Our findings indicate that even securities that are held by institutions and professional investors are affected by retail sentiment.

This paper uses Israeli data of inflation-indexed and nominal government bonds to estimate a discrete-time essentially affine term structure model. To estimate the model, I use a uniquely long-spanned sample of monthly real yields for the period of 01/1985-03/2018. The nominal yields data spans the period of 05/2001-03/2018. I document an unconditional upward sloping real term structure that the model ascribes to a rising real term premium while the average expected real short rates are relatively flat. A decomposition of the break-even inflation shows that the unconditional term structure of the inflation premium is increasing with maturity and most of the variance in the short end is due to expected inflation. However, in the long end, most of it is due to the inflation term premium.

Revision requested by IJCB [2021].

The Bank of Israel uses two models, one parametric and one non-parametric, to construct a distribution function for the future shekel/dollar exchange rate. The construction of the distribution is based on theoretical developments as described in the literature, adjusted to the market for forex options traded on the Israeli stock exchange. To calibrate the models, the Bank of Israel uses option prices sampled from the order book during the day. The purpose of this study is to propose a method for filtering out abnormal observations that arise due to the relatively low level of trade in a considerable share of options at the various strike prices using a filter based on the arbitrage rules found in the literature. The method improved the stability of both models in comparison to the filtering methods currently used at the Bank of Israel.

Memos

A short memo I wrote about the dash-for-cash in the Israeli government bond market in March of 2020 as a results of the spread of COVID-19.

Shorting the Dollar When Stock Markets Roar: The Equity Hedging Channel of Exchange Rate Determination (draft coming soon)

We analyze how institutional investors’ hedging demands affect the FX markets.

Assessing BOI's FX intervention (draft coming soon)

We analyze the effectiveness of the BOI’s intervention withe help of FX options.

• Reading
• Travelling
• Blitz Chess