The COVID-19 pandemic and associated policy responses triggered a historically large wave of capital reallocation between markets and asset classes. Using high-frequency country-level data, this paper examines if and how the number of COVID cases, the stringency of the lockdown, and the fiscal...

This paper shows that changes in the tone of central bank communication have a significant effect on asset prices. Tone captures how the central bank frames economic fundamentals and its monetary policy. When tone becomes more positive, stock prices increase, whereas credit spreads and...

This paper examines whether the ECB's Quantitative Easing (QE) policy is causing government bond prices to deviate from their fundamental value. We use a recent advance in the methodology to measure exuberant price behavior in financial time series introduced by Phillips et al. (2015). We extend...

In times when short-term policy rates are at or near the zero lower bound, central banks use unconventional policies such as forward guidance and quantitative easing to influence the slope of the yield curve. In this paper, we analyze the dynamic responses of key U.S. macroeconomic variables to...

While the literature has already widely documented the effects of macroeconomic news announcements on asset prices, as well as their asymmetric impact during good and bad times, we focus on the reaction to news based on the description of the state of the economy as painted by the Federal Open...

A large literature uses high-frequency changes in interest rates around FOMC announcements to study monetary policy. These yield changes have puzzlingly low explanatory power for the stock market - even in a narrow 30-minute window. We propose a new approach to test whether the unexplained...

Existing high-frequency monetary policy shocks explain surprisingly little variation in stock prices and exchange rates around FOMC announcements. Further, both of these asset classes display heightened volatility relative to non-announcement times. We use a heteroskedasticity-based procedure to...

We revisit a traditional topic in monetary economics: the relationship between asset prices and monetary policy. We study a model in which money helps facilitate trade in decentralized markets, as in Lagos andWright (2005), and real assets are traded in an over-the-counter (OTC) market, as in...

We examine the impact of the surge in trading activity following FOMC announcements on price discovery in the equity market, in particular in the highly liquid S&P 500 E-mini futures. In contrast to the hypothesis that all trading reflects learning about these public news announcements, we find...

We analyze optimal monetary policy and its implications for asset prices, when aggregate demand has inertia and responds to asset prices with a lag. If there is a negative output gap, the central bank optimally overshoots aggregate asset prices (asset prices are initially pushed above their...