This paper adopts a novel approach to studying the evolution of interest rate term structure over the U.S. business cycles and to predicting recessions. Applying an effective algorithm, I classify the Treasury yield curve into distinct shapes and find the less frequent shapes intrinsically...

This paper documents a strong association between stock-bond (SB) correlations and monetary policy regimes for a sample of 10 developed markets. Negative stock-bond correlations are associated with periods of accommodating monetary policy, but only in times of low inflation. Irrespective of the...

Today we live in a post-truth and highly digitalized era characterized by a flow of (mis-) information around the world. Identifying the impact of this information on stock markets and forecasting stock returns and volatilities has become a much more difficult task, perhaps almost impossible....

We document that since 1994, the equity premium is earned entirely in weeks zero, two, four and six in FOMC cycle time, that is, even weeks starting from the last FOMC meeting. We causally tie this fact to the Fed by studying intermeeting target changes, Fed funds futures, and internal Board of...

We document strong U.S. stock and bond return predictability from several macroeconomic volatility series before 1982, and a significant decline in this predictability during the Great Moderation. These findings are robust to alternative empirical specifications and out-of-sample tests. We...

While the unfolding financial turmoil has involved new elements, more fundamental elements have remained the same. New elements include structured credit, the originate-to-distribute business model and the tri-party repurchase agreement. The recurrence of crises reflects a basic procyclicality...

This study investigates whether monetary policy factors are critical for understanding the cross-section of expected returns in stock markets from 1954Q1 to 2011Q1. Equipped with misspecification-robust statistics, I show that the permanent monetary policy shocks to inflation target have...

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...

We study how monetary policy and risk shocks affect asset prices in the US, the euro area, and Japan, differentiating between "traditional" monetary policy and communication events, each decomposed into "pure" and information shocks. Communication shocks from the US spill over to risk in the...

The monetary policy shocks have been widely regarded to have effects on the financial markets. Before the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve adjusted the federal funds target rate to implement the monetary policy. This paper uses event studies to examine the relationship between the...