We provide strong evidence of persistent cyclical variation in the sensitivity of stock returns to macroeconomic news announcement (MNA) surprises. When the economy is significantly below trend (output gap is large and negative) and interest rates are not expected to go up, the stock return...

In recent years, warnings of a populist threat to central bank independence have proliferated. These warnings are based on a deep-seated antagonism between technocracy and populism.I argue that to understand current challenges for central banks, we should question the assumed antagonism between...

I study the role of firms' uncertainty in the transmission of forward guidance to investment. To do so, I employ a quarterly firm-level panel of U.S. publicly traded firms. I measure forward guidance shocks based on unexpected changes in the slope of the yield curve in a 30-minute window around...

We use daily survey data from Gallup to assess whether households' beliefs about economic conditions are influenced by surprises in monetary policy announcements. We first provide more general evidence that public confidence in the state of the economy reacts to certain types of macroeconomic...

Macroeconomic and microeconomic data paint conflicting pictures of price behavior. Macroeconomic data suggest that inflation is inertial. Microeconomic data indicate that firms change prices frequently. We formulate and estimate a model which resolves this apparent micro - macro conflict. Our...

We use daily survey data from Gallup to assess whether households' beliefs about economic conditions are influenced by surprises in monetary policy announcements. We first provide more general evidence that public confidence in the state of the economy reacts to certain types of macroeconomic...

Using a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR), this paper shows that residential investment contributes substantially to GDP following monetary policy shocks. Further, it shows that the number of new housing units built, not changes in the sizes of existing or new housing units, drives...

We use a decade of daily survey data from Gallup to study how monetary policy influences households' beliefs about economic conditions. We first document that public confidence in the state of the economy reacts instantaneously to certain types of macroeconomic news. Next, we show that surprises...

A major factor behind this crisis is financialization of the system, with a growing disconnect between the monetary and the real sector. Some proponents of the Islamic finance claim such financial crisis would have been avoided, if asset-backed Islamic finance were adopted. However, while...

We construct a new measure of monetary policy surprise based on a natural language processing algorithm designed to capture contextual nuances in FOMC statements. Specifically we exploit cross-sectional variations across alternative FOMC statements to identify the statement's tone, and compare...