Most central banks effect changes to their target or policy rate in discrete increments (e.g., multiples of 0.25%) following public announcements on scheduled dates. Still, for most applications, researchers rely on the assumption that the policy rate changes linearly with economic conditions...

The uncertainty around future changes to the Federal Reserve target rate varies over time. In our results, the main driver of uncertainty is a "path" factor signaling information about future policy actions, which is filtered from federal funds futures data. The uncertainty is highest when it...

Benchmark finance and macroeconomic models appear to deliver conflicting estimates of the natural rate and bond risk premia. This natural rate puzzle applies not only in the U.S. but across many advanced economies. We use a unified no-arbitrage macro- finance model with two trend factors to...

In this paper, we evaluate the forecast performance of a range of atheoretic and theory informed models of bond and stock returns. The decision making environment is fully described for an investor who would like to optimally allocate his portfolio between bonds and stocks, over an investment...

We measure the impact of the UK's initial 2009-10 Quantitative Easing (QE) Programme on bonds and other assets. First, we use a macro-finance yield curve both to create a counterfactual path for bond yields and to estimate the impact of QE directly. Second, we analyse the impact of individual QE...

Central banks repo market operations and liquidity infusions occasion a structural liquidity mismatch in bank balance sheets and increase the dependence on central bank liquidity. This paper argues for what I term “Circular Monetary Economics”, an approach to monetary policy that seeks to...

We use a standard macrofinancial no-arbitrage term structure model to forecast key macroeconomic variables such as GDP. Simple adaptations to the model are proposed in order to generate plausible forecasts in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. The financial market variables included in the...

This paper investigates the role of monetary policy uncertainty for the transmission of FOMC actions to financial markets using a novel model-free measure of uncertainty based on derivative prices. We document a systematic pattern in monetary policy uncertainty over the course of the FOMC...

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market - rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities - led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

We evaluate the properties of mean reversion and mean aversion in asset prices and returns as commonly characterized in the finance literature. The study is undertaken within a class of well-known dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models and shows that the mean reversion/aversion...