This paper assesses the change in Federal Reserve policy introduced in 1999, with the publication of statements about the outlook for monetary policy (and later about the balance of risks) immediately after each FOMC meeting. We find that markets anticipated monetary policy decisions equally...

The paper assesses the communication strategies of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank and their effectiveness. We find that the effectiveness of communication is not independent from the decisionmaking process in the committee. The paper shows that the Federal...

The paper shows that central bank communication is a key determinant of the market’s ability to anticipate monetary policy decisions and the future path of interest rates. Comparing communication policies by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the ECB since 1999, we find that...

This paper explores whether there are systematic patterns as to when members of the decision-making committees of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank communicate with the public, and under what circumstances such communication has the ability to move financial...

This paper studies the determinants of interest rate spreads of euro area 10 year government bonds against the benchmark, the German bund, after the introduction of the euro. In particular, it pays attention to the question whether market discipline is advanced or obstructed by financial...

How do financial markets price new information? This paper analyzes price setting at the intersection of private and public information, by testing whether and how the reaction of financial markets to public signals depends on the relative importance of private information in agents’...

This study calibrates the term structure of risk premia before and during the 2007/2008 financial crisis using a new calibration approach based on credit default swaps. The risk premium term structure was flat before the crisis and downward sloping during the crisis. The instantaneous risk...

The VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, strongly co-moves with measures of the monetary policy stance. When decomposing the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility (“uncertainty”), we find that a lax monetary policy decreases...

We use a Smooth Transition Conditional Correlation GARCH (STCC-GARCH) model applied to the euro area monetary policy rates and sovereign yields of Italy, Spain and Germany at 5-year maturity to estimate the threshold level of the signals above which the sovereign bond market moves to a crisis...