The European Central Bank's asset purchase programs, while intended to stabilize the economy, may have unintended side effects on financial stability. This paper aims at gauging the effects on financial markets, the banking sector, and lending to non-financial firms. Using a structural vector...

This note proposes an update to Figure 1 in "Macroeconomic Shocks and their Propagation" in the Handbook of Macroeconomics of 2016 (Ramey, 2016). Figure 1 of Ramey (2016) reports Impulse-Response Functions (IRFs) of variables of interest to a shock in the Federal Funds Rate, following the...

We disentangle the effects of monetary policy announcements on real economic variables into an interest rate shock component and a central bank information shock component. We identify both components using changes in interest rate futures and in exchange rates around monetary policy...

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the power of forward guidance at different horizons, shedding new light on the strength of the "forward guidance puzzle". Our identification strategy allows us to disentangle the change in future interest rates stemming from deviations from the...

Exploiting the heteroscedasticity of the changes in short-term and long-term interest rates and exchange rates around the FOMC announcement, we identify three structural monetary policy shocks. We eliminate the predictable part of the shocks and study their effects on financial variables and...

We calibrate a standard New Keynesian model with three alternative representations of monetary policy- an optimal timeless rule, a Taylor rule and another with interest rate smoothing- with the aim of testing which if any can match the data according to the method of indirect inference. We find...

Policy counterfactuals based on estimated structural VARs routinely suggest that bringing Alan Greenspan back in the 1970s' United States would not have prevented the Great Inflation. We show that a standard policy counterfactual suggests that the Bundesbank - which is near-universally credited...

This paper estimates the effects of unconventional monetary policies on consumer as well as asset price inflation, economic activity and bank lending at the hand of a VAR analysis, covering episodes of balance sheet policies of 9 countries over the last 20 years. While recent episodes of...

Policy counterfactuals based on estimated structural VARs routinely suggest that bringing Alan Greenspan back in the 1970s' United States would not have prevented the Great Inflation. We show that a standard policy counterfactual suggests that the Bundesbank – which is near-universally...

We present a new automated, objective and intuitive scoring technique to measure the content of central bank communication about future interest rate decisions based on information from the Internet and news sources. We apply the methodology to statements released by the Federal Open Market...