Central bank informal communications became more frequent and acquired more mass media attention after the global financial crisis. Do investors react to the content (e.g., future expansionary or restrictive policy) of informal central bank communications? And especially, do investors have a...

This paper analyses the effects of containment measures and monetary and fiscal responses on US financial markets during the Covid-19 pandemic. More specifically, it applies fractional integration methods to analyse their impact on the daily S&P500, the US Treasury Bond Index (USTB), the S&P...

We analyze empirical links between the perceived tail-risk of inflation, the policy rate, longer-term interest rates, and equity prices in the U.S. Their simultaneous changes enable us to distinguish between a systematic and "exogenous" response to monetary-policy news. And, those tail...

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...

Asset-pricing facts on FOMC announcements have changed strikingly in the last decade. The pre-announcement drift has disappeared, and other known facts - the announcement premium and a stronger CAPM - now concentrate on a subset of announcements. We propose these distinct patterns correspond to...

We find that the FOMC-announcement-day return premium earned by a firm is positively related to the increase in its ex ante, option-implied skewness prior to the announcement. This finding is consistent with: (1) the existence of an announcement-day Fed put that is partially anticipated by the...

We study the effects of central bank communication about financial stability on individuals’ expectations and risk-taking. Using a randomized information experiment, we show that communication causally affects individuals’ beliefs and investment behavior, consistent with an expectations...

This paper provides new empirical evidence that bears on the efficacy of unconventional monetary policies when the main policy rate is negative. When a negative interest rate policy (NIRP) is deployed in concert with rate forward guidance (FG) and quantitative easing (QE), the identification of...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic response of stock market volatility to changes in monetary policy. Using a vector autoregressive model, our findings reveal a significant and asymmetric response of stock returns and volatility to monetary policy shocks. Although the increase in the...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic response of stock market volatility to changes in monetary policy. Using a vector autoregressive model, our findings reveal a significant and asymmetric response of stock returns and volatility to monetary policy shocks. Although the increase in the...