This paper presents empirical evidence on one aspect of central bank communication policy - formal pronouncements by central bankers - to better understand whether this channel matters and, if so, the nature of the information being transmitted. We examine the relationship between three types of...

We investigate the political determinants of risk premiums which sub-national governments in Switzerland have to pay for their sovereign bond emissions. For this purpose we analyse financial market data from 288 tradable cantonal bonds in the period from 1981 to 2007. Our main focus is on two...

The Savings Directive has been celebrated as a major political break-through in coordinating taxation in Europe. Against this background, the present paper evaluates the real-world effects of this directive. The directive has left a loophole by providing grandfathering (exemption from...

We investigate the dynamics of prices, information and expectations in a competitive, noisy, dynamic asset pricing equilibrium model with long-term investors. We argue that the fact that prices can score worse or better than consensus opinion in predicting the fundamentals is a product of...

This paper proposes a new double-question survey method that elicits information about how individuals subjective belief valuations are compared and related to their price expectations. An individual respondent is presented with two sets of questions, one that asks about his/her belief regarding...

Monetary policy shocks have a large impact on aggregate stock market returns in narrow event windows around press releases by the Federal Open Market Committee. We use spatial autoregressions to decompose the overall effect of monetary policy shocks into a direct (demand) effect and an indirect...

We show that dealers' limited market participation, coupled with an informational friction resulting from lack of market transparency, can make liquidity demand upward sloping, inducing strategic complementarities: traders demand more liquidity when the market becomes less liquid, fostering...

Auctions of government bonds are the main allotment method used by the Treasury of advanced economies. Previous research has found that auctions have an influence on the market yield days before they take place, and underpricing is usually spotted when their outcome is compared with...

We study the impact of diverse beliefs on conduct of monetary policy. We use a New Keynesian Model solved with a quadratic approximation. Aggregation renders the belief distribution an aggregate state variable. Diverse expectations change standard results about a smooth trade-off between...

This interdisciplinary paper explains how mathematical techniques of stochastic optimal control can be applied to the recent subprime mortgage crisis. Why did the financial markets fail to anticipate the recent debt crisis, despite the large literature in mathematical finance concerning optimal...