This paper shows that the Fed reacts to change in spreads between corporate bond yields and government bond yields over and beyond their information content on future inflation and future activity. This result, obtained in a GMM framework, is confirmed by simulation methods. Moreover, when...

We investigate both theoretically and empirically how unemployment level and its growth affect future stock returns. We find that both a higher unemployment rate and higher growth of unemployment positively predict future stock market returns. In our model, the effects come through their...

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of monetary policy on equity returns by applying an alternative econometric approach. Campbell and Ammer (1993) decomposed unexpected equity excess returns into three news components: risk premium news, real interest rate news and cash-flow...

Discount rates affect stock prices directly via the discount-rate channel or indirectly via the cash-flow channel because expected future cash-flow growth varies with the discount rates. The traditional Macaulay duration captures the effect from the discount-rate channel. I propose a novel...

Do housing and equity booms significantly raise the probability of extremely bad outcomes at the margin? This study addresses this question for a group of 8 East Asian countries. The main findings are the following: (i) Asset price booms in housing and equity markets, either separately or...

We investigate the effects of U.S. monetary policy on asset prices using a high-frequency event-study analysis. We test whether these effects are adequately captured by a single factor - changes in the federal funds rate target - and find that they are not. Instead, we find that two factors are...

This paper investigates the factors that affect the covariance between the federal funds rate and stock returns. I estimate a VAR system and implement covariance decomposition analysis. Most of the covariance between the federal funds rate and stock returns is affected by changes in stock market...

This paper proposes an approach to study the expected excess return of a long-term bond and focuses on a lower bound. This lower bound is a crucial number, as it represents the minimum expected excess return demanded by investors. The derived bound is model-independent and can be extracted from...

I construct a no-arbitrage term structure model with endogenous regime shifts and apply it to Japanese government bond (JGB) yields. This application subjects the short-term interest rate to monetary regime shifts, such as a zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) and normal regimes, which depend on...