Credit rating agencies make multiple announcements, some of which are intended to reflect the latest information available about a firm and others of which are intended to provide a stable signal of credit quality. Using data on CDS spreads, we examine which of these different types of rating...

A salient feature of the Asian crisis of 1997 was a collapse of stock markets that took place over several months. The dynamics of this collapse raises the question of what information was driving the markets. This paper examines a key aspect of this question: did information flow from the...

In recent years, a number of structural developments have had a significant influence on the functioning of financial markets. The most important of these developments are the introduction of the euro, the spread of electronic trading, shifts in the constellation and behaviour of market...

We analyse high-frequency responses of the US yield curve to macroeconomic announcements, exploiting the high signal-to-noise ratios of these events. Surprises in the announcements evoke relatively weak reactions from the short maturities and the strong ones from the intermediate maturities....

Corporate bond issuers in emerging economies in Asia have often had a choice between an onshore market and an offshore one. Since 1998, however, many of these issuers have increasingly turned to the onshore market. This paper investigates systematically what factors have influenced this choice...

This paper reviews research carried out on exchange rates and monetary policy by central banks that participated at the Autumn Meeting of Central Bank Economists on "Exchange rates and monetary policy", which the BIS hosted on 28-29 October 2004. The first part of the paper focuses on the...

This paper examines the role of the natural rate of interest in the conduct of monetary policy. The natural rate figures prominently in many theories of the business cycle and of inflation fluctuations, and therefore has the potential to play a key role in monetary policy given the current...

This paper studies the influence of the state of the business cycle on credit ratings. In particular, we assess whether rating agencies are excessively procyclical in their assignment of ratings. Our analysis is based on a model of ratings determination that takes into account factors that...

We estimate arbitrage-free term structure models of US Treasury yields and spreads on BBB and Brated corporate bonds in a doubly-stochastic intensity-based framework. A novel feature of our analysis is the inclusion of macroeconomic variables – indicators of real activity, inflation and...

We study the implications for optimal monetary policy of introducing habit formation in consumption into a general equilibrium model with sticky prices. Habit formation affects the model's endogenous dynamics through its effects on both aggregate demand and households' supply of output. We show...