Fed's monetary policy announcements convey a mix of news about different kinds of conventional and unconventional policies and about the economy. Financial market responses to these announcements are very leptokurtic: often tiny, but sometimes large. I estimate the underlying structural shocks...

This paper compares impulse responses to monetary policy shocks in the euro area countries before the EMU and in the New Member States (NMS) from central-eastern Europe. We mitigate the small sample problem, which is especially acute for the NMS, by using a Bayesian estimation that combines...

This paper examines which measures of financial conditions are informative about the tail risks to output growth in the euro area. The Composite Indicator of Systemic Stress (CISS) is more informative than indicators focusing on narrower segments of financial markets or their simple aggregation...