We provide evidence that changes in the equity price and volatility of individual firms (measures that approximate the definition of 'granular shock' given in Gabaix, 2010) are key to improve the predictability of aggregate business cycle fluctuations in a number of countries. Specifically,...

Policy impact studies often suffer from endogeneity problems. Consider the case of the ECB Securities Markets Programme: If Eurosystem interventions were triggered by sudden and strong price deteriorations, looking at daily price changes may bias downwards the correlation between yields and the...

Market participants often invest in order to acquire information that pertains to the market itself (e.g. order flow) rather than to fundamentals. This enables them to infer more information from past trades. I show that agents trading on such information, typically high-frequency traders,...

The Great Recession has been characterised by the two stylized facts: the buildup of leverage in the household sector in the period preceding the recession and a protracted economic recovery that followed. We attempt to explain these two facts as an information friction, whereby agents are...

We examine stock index and Treasury futures markets around releases of U.S. macroeconomic announcements. Seven out of 21 market-moving announcements show evidence of substantial informed trading before the official release time. Prices begin to move in the "correct" direction about 30 minutes...

The literature documents a heterogeneous asset price response to macroeconomic news announcements: Some announcements have a strong impact on asset prices and others do not. In order to explain these differences, we estimate a novel measure of the intrinsic value of a macroeconomic announcement,...

This paper analyses the effects of US monetary policy on stock markets. We find that, on average, a tightening of 50 basis points reduces returns by about 3%. Moreover, returns react more strongly when no change had been expected, when there is a directional change in the monetary policy stance...

Using intra-day data, we assess the impact of the press release on euro area monetary data on the different segments of the euro area yield curve. For this purpose, we estimate a relation between the “news” or “surprise” in the released data for annual M3 growth and the move in the...

During 2005-2006, the Chinese government implemented a reform aimed at eliminating the so-called non-tradable shares (NTS) typically held by the State or by politically connected institutional investors that were issued at the early stage of financial market development. Our analysis, based on...