It is widely believed that the Fed controls the funds rate by altering the degree of pressure in the reserve market through open market operations when it changes its target for the federal funds rate. Recently, however, several economists have suggested that open market operations may not be...

It is well known that information arrival has an impact on prices volatility, and trading volume in financial markets (see e.g., Goodhart and O?Hara 1997). Scheduled macroeconomic announcements, such as monthly employment figures, consumer prices, or building permits, stand out from the steady...

This paper delineates the simultaneous impact of non-anticipated information on first and second moments of the intraday price process by including appropriate variables accounting for the news flow into both the mean and the variance function. This allows us to differentiate between the...

This paper investigates whether the degree and the nature of economic and monetary policy interdependence between the United States and the euro area have changed with the advent of EMU. Using real-time data, it addresses this issue from the perspective of financial markets by analysing the...

We characterize the response of U.S., German and British stock, bond and foreign exchange markets to real-time U.S. macroeconomic news. Our analysis is based on a unique data set of high-frequency futures returns for each of the markets. We find that news surprises produce conditional mean...

While companies have emerged as very proactive donors in the wake of recent major disasters like Hurricane Katrina, it remains unclear whether that corporate generosity generates benefits to firms themselves. The literature on strategic philanthropy suggests that such philanthropic behavior may...

This note examines how the DEM/USD rate and US short-term and long-term interest rates respond to the release of payroll announcements. In contrast to a recent paper by Edison (1997), who employs a linear econometric model, we test the influence of news by comparing the absolute values of the...

Macro announcements change the equilibrium riskfree rate. We find that treasury prices reflect part of the impact instantaneously, but intermediaries rely on their customer order flow in the 15 minutes after the announcement to discover the full impact. We show that this customer flow...

Bayesian learning provides the core concept of processing noisy information. In standard Bayesian frameworks, assessing the price impact of information requires perfect knowledge of news' precision. In practice, however, precision is rarely dis- closed. Therefore, we extend standard Bayesian...

We examine two approaches characterized by different tail features to extract market expectations on the Mexican peso-US dollar exchange rate. Expectations are gauged by risk-neutral densities. The methods used to estimate these densities are the Volatility Function Technique (VFT) and the...