This paper examines whether monetary policy reaction function matters for financial stability. We measure how responsive the Federal Reserve's policy appears to be to imbalances in the equity, housing and credit markets. We find that changes in these policy sensitivities predict the later...

Recent findings on the term structure of equity and bond yields pose serious challenges to existing models of equilibrium asset pricing. This paper presents a new equilibrium model of subjective expectations to explain the joint historical dynamics of equity and bond yields (and their yield...

Equilibrium bond-pricing models rely on inflation being bad news for future growth to generate upward-sloping nominal yield curves. We develop a model that can generate upward-sloping nominal and real yield curves by instead using ambiguity about inflation and growth. Ambiguity can help resolve...

Some key features in the historical dynamics of U.S. Treasury bond yields-a trend in long-term yields, business cycle movements in short-term yields, and a level shift in yield spreads-pose serious challenges to existing equilibrium asset pricing models. This paper presents a new equilibrium...

This paper examines the effect of macroeconomic news announcements (MNA) on the stock market. Stocks exhibit a strong positive response to major MNA: 1 standard deviation of MNA surprise causes 11-25 bps higher returns. This response is highly time-varying and is weaker during periods of high...

Financial markets embed expectations of central bank policy into asset prices. This paper compares two approaches that extract a probability density of market beliefs. The first is a simulatedmoments estimator for option volatilities described in Mizrach (2002); the second is a new approach...

We analyze empirical links between the perceived tail-risk of inflation, the policy rate, longer-term interest rates, and equity prices in the U.S. Their simultaneous changes enable us to distinguish between a systematic and "exogenous" response to monetary-policy news. And, those tail...

Monetary policy shocks have a large impact on stock prices during narrow time windows centered around press releases by the FOMC. We use spatial autoregressions to decompose the overall effect of monetary policy shocks into a direct effect and a network effect. We attribute 50 to 85 percent of...

Financial markets embed expectations of central bank policy into asset prices. This paper compares two approaches that extract a probability density of market beliefs. The first is a simulated moments estimator for option volatilities described in Mizrach (2002); the second is a new approach...

The financial crisis has highlighted the need for models that can identify counterparty risk exposures and shock transmission processes at the systemic level. We use the euro area financial accounts (flow of funds) data to construct a sector-level network of bilateral balance sheet exposures and...