The ECB has accepted increasing amounts of rubbish collateral since the crisis started leading to exposure to serious private sector credit risk (i.e. default risk) on its collateralised lending and reverse operations ("repo"). This has led some commentators to argue that the ECB needs "fiscal...

We tackle two questions in this paper: In the sovereign debt crisis, what moves the euro area inflation outlook and has the firm anchoring of medium to long-term inflation expectations been touched? Deriving densities from a new data set on options on the euro area harmonized index of consumer...

Over the last two decades, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the rate-setting body of the United States Federal Reserve System, has become increasingly communicative and transparent. According to policymakers, one of the goals of this shift has been to improve monetary 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...

Using futures data for the period 1990 - 2008, this paper finds evidence that expansionary monetary policy surprises tend to increase crude and heating oil prices, and contractionary monetary policy shocks increase gold and platinum prices. Our analysis uncovers substantial heterogeneity in the...

We tackle two questions in this paper: In the sovereign debt crisis, what moves the euro area inflation outlook and has the firm anchoring of medium to long-term inflation expectations been touched? Deriving densities from a new data set on options on the euro area harmonized index of consumer...

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...

This paper examines how the Fed's monetary policy decisions affect the implied volatility of the S&P 500 index. The results show that stock market uncertainty is significantly affected by the Fed's policy decisions. In particular, we find that implied volatility generally decreases after FOMC...

Adding contingently convertible debt securities, cocos, in an amount equal to about 3% of tangible assets to the financing mix of financial institutions is a promising reform idea. It would also be inexpensive for these institutions to issue cocos and thus to be prepared to recapitalize and to...