Fiscal flows and asset prices

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O'Connell, Michael and Fletcher, Jonathan (2026) Fiscal flows and asset prices. Empirical Economics. ISSN 0377-7332 (In Press) (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-026-02901-w)

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Abstract

This paper investigates whether incorporating daily U.S. fiscal flows improves the explanatory power of traditional asset pricing models. Using data from October 2005 to April 2024, we assess model performance through both classical alpha testing and Bayesian model comparison following the framework of Bryzgalova, Huang, and Julliard (2023). The results show that the inclusion of the fiscal flow measure reduces average alpha across a variety of test asset portfolios and consistently appears in the top-performing models identified by the Bayesian framework. While the statistical evidence for a single dominant model is modest, these findings suggest that daily fiscal operations contain valuable information for asset pricing.

ORCID iDs

O'Connell, Michael and Fletcher, Jonathan ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0568-9145;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)