We document stylized facts about China's recent exchange rate policy for its currency, the renminbi (RMB). Our empirical findings suggest that a "two-pillar policy" is in place, aiming to balance RMB index stability and exchange rate flexibility. We then develop a tractable no-arbitrage model of...

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...

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...

We develop a novel contract design, the fed funds futures (FFF) variance futures, which reflects the expected realized basis point variance of an underlying FFF rate. The valuation of short-term FFF variance futures is completely model-independent in a general setting that includes the cases...

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,...

Traders worldwide use interest rate options and futures to speculate on future monetary decisions, in particular in countries where the monetary regime is Inflation Targeting (IT). Central Banks under an IT regime tend to define the target rate on scheduled meetings. We propose in this paper a...

The issues of liquidity and price transparency in derivatives markets have taken on greater import given regulatory efforts under way to improve their transparency. To date, the lack of transaction data has impeded the understanding of how the inflation swap and other derivatives markets...

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...

Using transaction data from the first half of 2020, we examine the reaction of corporate credit spreads to the Federal Reserve's monetary policy announcements. We find evidence that the bond markets are segmented across credit ratings, which led to different initial reactions across bonds with...

We use a series of different approaches to extract information about crash risk from option prices for the Euro-Dollar exchange rate, with each step sharpening the focus on extracting more specific measures of crash risk around dates of ECB measures of Unconventional Monetary Policy. Several...