We discuss the pros of adopting government-issued digital currencies as well as a supranational digital iCurrency. One such pro is to get rid of paper money (and coinage), a ubiquitous medium for spreading germs, as highlighted by the recent coronavirus outbreak. We set forth three policy...

We study the effects of a conventional monetary expansion, quantitative easing, and operation twist on corporate bond yields and spreads. These policies are simulated as shocks to the Treasury yield curve, and the impulse response functions of corporate yields and spreads to shocks are computed...

The study models the behaviour of the Central Bank of Nigeria. An extended Taylor's framework that accounted for exchange rate dynamics and political risk factors was adopted. In order to capture both ex-ante and ex-post behaviours of the monetary authority in the country, Markov-Switching...

Are monetary policy regimes state-dependent? To answer the question this paper estimates New Keynesian general equilibrium models that allow the state of the economy to influence the monetary authority's stance on inflation. I take advantage of recent developments in solving rational...

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...

I propose a simple framework that quantifies the stance of monetary policy as a 'shadow short rate' when the term structure is near the zero lower bound. I demonstrate my framework with a one-factor model applied to Japanese data, including an intuitive economic interpretation of the results,...

This paper examines the association between option-implied interest rate distributions and macroeconomic expectations in the context of a forward-looking monetary policy rule. We presume that market participants view the policy rule as a guide to the path of future policy rates and price...

The recent financial crisis caused dramatic widening and elevated volatilities among basis spreads in cross currency as well as domestic interest rate markets. Furthermore, the widespread use of collateral has made the effective funding cost of financial institutions for the trades significantly...

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...

Over the past decade, many central banks reduced interest rates to near-zero levels. I show that this has important implications for the dynamics of asset prices. In both the US and Japan, one such effect was that the correlation of stock and nominal bond returns decreased sharply as the short...