A number of recent papers have used short-maturity financial instruments to measure expectations of the future course of monetary policy, and have used high-frequency changes in these instruments around FOMC dates to measure monetary policy shocks. This paper evaluates the empirical success of a...

This paper measures the effects of the risks associated with the war in Iraq on various U.S. financial variables using a heteroskedasticity-based estimation technique. The results indicate that increases in what we call the "war risk" factor caused declines in Treasury yields and equity prices,...

Federal funds and eurodollar futures contracts are among the most useful instruments for deriving expectations of the future path of monetary policy. However, reading policy expectations from those instruments is complicated by the presence of risk premia. This paper demonstrates how to extract...

Movements in the stock market can have a significant impact on the macroeconomy and are therefore likely to be an important factor in the determination of monetary policy. However, little is known about the magnitude of the Federal Reserve's reaction to the stock market. One reason is that it is...

The tendency for changes in the federal funds rate to be implemented gradually has been considered evidence of an interest-rate smoothing objective for the Federal Reserve. This paper investigates whether gradual movements in the federal funds rate can be explained by the dynamic structure of...

This paper derives a measure of inflation compensation from the yields of a Treasury inflation-indexed security and a portfolio of STRIPS that has similar liquidity and duration as the indexed security. This measure can be used as a proxy for inflation expectations if the inflation risk premium...

The value of a vast array of financial assets are functions of rates or prices determined in OTC, interbank, or other off-exchange markets. In order to price such derivative assets, underlying rate and price indexes are routinely sampled and estimated. To guard against misreporting, whether...

This paper demonstrates that long-term forward interest rates in the U.S. often react considerably to surprises in macroeconomic data releases and monetary policy announcements. This behavior is inconsistent with the assumption of many macroeconomic models that the long-run properties of the...

The Federal Reserve and other central banks tend to change short-term interest rates in sequences of small steps in the same direction and reverse the direction of interest rate movements only infrequently. These characteristics, often referred to as interest-rate smoothing, have led to...

Estimating the response of asset prices to changes in monetary policy is complicated by the endogeneity of policy decisions and the fact that both interest rates and asset prices react to numerous other variables. This paper develops a new estimator that is based on the heteroskedasticity that...