Many commentators have argued that if the Federal Reserve had followed a stricter monetary policy earlier this decade when the housing bubble was forming, and if Congress had not deregulated banking but had imposed tighter financial standards, the housing boom and bust - and the subsequent...

This paper examines the patterns of trading behaviour, in the period surrounding monetary policy announcements. Utilizing a high-frequency data-set, with broker identifiers enabling classification of trades executed through institutional and retail brokers, I investigate all trades submitted on...

This paper is built around a simple premise that is based on the theoretical models of Harris and Raviv (1993) and Kandel and Pearson (1995). Complex statements are more difficult to interpret and may be construed in different ways by different agents. This creates heterogeneity of beliefs among...

I show that a congruent, parsimonious, encompassing model discovered using David Hendry's econometric modelling approach and Autometrics can overcome the many inadequacies of the typical static models of US Treasury returns regressed on macroeconomic announcements. The typical specification...

We find elevated Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) is associated with reductions in corporate bond dealer inventories and worsening liquidity, suggesting bond dealers react to increased inventory risk by reducing their capital commitments and compensating themselves via increased transaction...

This paper investigates the stock market reaction to the tone of central bank communication. We use textual analysis techniques to measure the tonality of the FOMC minutes’ text and show that a more optimistic tonality has a positive impact on stock returns. This positive effect is prevalent...

We show that the difference between the natural rate of interest and the current level of monetary policy stance, which we label Convergence Gap (CG), contains information that is valuable for bond predictability. Adding CG in forecasting regressions of bond excess returns significantly raises...

This paper explores liquidity movements in stock and Treasury bond markets over a period of more than 1800 trading days. Cross-market dynamics in liquidity are documented by estimating a vector autoregressive model for liquidity (that is, bid-ask spreads and depth), returns, volatility, and...

This article analyzes the impact of the unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) of four major central banks (the Fed, ECB, BoE and BOJ) on market uncertainty. We exploit the heterogeneity of different UMP actions to disentangle their influence on reducing the ex ante perception of extreme events...

In an effort to increase transparency, the Chair of the Federal Reserve now holds a press conference following some, but not all, FOMC announcements. Evidence from financial markets shows that investors lower their expectations of important decisions on days without press conferences and that...