remarks at an economics luncheon co-sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (Seattle Branch) and the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

Economists have long understood that financial market variables contain considerable information about the future of the economy. Recently a number of researchers have pointed out that interest rates and interest rate spreads--that is, differences between interest rates on alternative financial...

remarks at an economics luncheon co-sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (Seattle Branch) and the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

Extending the approach of Bernanke and Blinder (1992), Strongin (1992), and Christano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (1994a, 1994b), we develop and apply a VAR-based methodology for measuring the stance of monetary policy. More specifically, we develop a "demi-structural" VAR approach, which extracts...

A large body of literature has failed to find conclusive evidence that the expectations theory of the term structure holds in U.S. data. This paper asks more narrowly whether the theory holds conditional on an exogenous change in monetary policy. We argue that previous work on the expectation...

This paper documents the impact of U.S. monetary policy announcement surprises on foreign equity indexes, short- and long-term interest rates, and exchange rates in 49 countries. We use two proxies for monetary policy surprises: the surprise change to the current target federal funds rate...

This paper studies recent models of the liquidity effect of money on interest rates to determine if a systematic relationship between liquidity shocks and the economy could affect the average real interest rate.

High real interest rates have been observed in many countries for several months after the adoption of disinflation programs. While they may reflect primarily a liquidity crunch, high ex post real interest rates can also be explained in terms of an ex post error in inflation expectations that...

Many recent papers have studied movements in stock, bond, and currency prices over short windows of time around macro announcements. This paper adds to the announcement effects literature in two ways. First, we study the joint announcement effects across a broad range of assets--exchange rates...

This paper analyzes the impact of U.S. monetary policy announcement surprises on U.S. and foreign firm-level equity prices. We find that U.S. monetary policy has important influences on foreign equity prices on average, but with considerable variation across firms. We have found that this...