We study disruptions in debt markets during the COVID-19 crisis. The safer end of the credit spectrum experienced significant losses that are hard to fully reconcile with standard default or risk premium channels. Corporate bonds traded at a large discount to their corresponding CDS, and this...

At the announcement of a new policy, agents form a view of state-contingent policy actions and impact. We develop a method to estimate this state-contingent perception and implement it for many asset-purchase interventions worldwide. Expectations of larger support in bad states--"policy...

Long-run asset-pricing restrictions in a macro term-structure model identify discretionary monetary policy separately from a policy rule. We find that policy discretion is an important contributor to aggregate risk. In addition, discretionary easing coincides with good news about the...

Identification problems arise naturally in forward-looking models when agents observe more than economists. We illustrate the problem in several New Keynesian and macro-finance models in which the Taylor rule includes a shock unseen by economists. We show that identification of the rule's...

Conditional yield skewness is an important summary statistic of the state of the economy. It exhibits pronounced variation over the business cycle and with the stance of monetary policy, and a tight relationship with the slope of the yield curve. Most importantly, variation in yield skewness has...

We develop a general policy analysis framework for an open economy that features nominal rigidities and financial frictions giving rise to endogenous PPP and UIP deviations. The efficient allocation can be implemented with monetary policy closing the output gap and FX interventions eliminating...

We discover a novel monetary policy shock that has a widespread impact on aggregate financial conditions. Our shock can be summarized by the response of long-horizon yields to Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements; not only is it orthogonal to changes in the near-term path of policy...

We study the ability of monetary policy announcements to influence interest rates at all maturities as well as asset prices more broadly. Using a novel methodology, we discover two distinct monetary policy shocks. The primary factor is a long rate factor which we find is related to aggregate...