This paper studies competition in price discovery between spot and futures rates for the EUR–USD and JPY–USD markets around scheduled macroeconomic announcements. Using both the information shares approach and the common factor component weight approach for futures prices from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), as well as deal prices from spot trading on the Electronic Broking Services (EBS), we gauge how foreign exchange spot and futures markets respond to news surprises. The results show that the spot rates provide more price discovery than do the CME futures rates overall; however, the contribution of the futures rates to price discovery increases in the time surrounding macroeconomic announcement releases.

We characterize the relationship between the rent-to-price ratio, expected returns, and expected rent growth in a dynamic housing valuation model, where the middle-aged-to-young (MY) ratio determines the slowly evolving mean of the rent-to-price ratio. The link between demographic trends and the housing market dynamics is established by analyzing how individuals’ housing demand varies across age cohorts using household-level survey data. Empirical results show that deviations of the rent-to-price ratio from its slowly evolving mean, which is determined by the MY ratio, exhibit pronounced predictive power for returns but weak predictive power for rent growth. Further analysis reveals heterogeneous evidence across sample cities.