This paper explains the emergence of liquidity traps in the aftermath of large-scale financial crises, as happened in the US 1930s, Japan 1990s and recently in the US and Europe. The paper introduces a new balance sheet channel that links equity capital to the risk-free interest rate. When...

This paper attempts to identify how monetary policy shocks affect stock prices by using Mundell and Fleming's theory of the Impossible Trinity. According to this theory, it is impossible to simultaneously have a fixed exchange rate, free capital movement (an absence of capital controls), and an...

Explanations of why changes in the relative quantities of safe debt seem to affect asset prices often appeal informally to a portfolio balance mechanism. I show how this type of effect can be incorporated in a general class of structural, arbitrage-free asset-pricing models using a numerical...

In this paper, we lay out a simple framework that captures much of what the theoretical literature has to say about the role of credit in systemically important asset booms and busts. In addition, we suggest ways in which to incorporate physical investment in the bubble asset as well as monetary...

We study the yields in the German treasury bills market. We take a detailed look at the yield banks require to buy treasury bills in the primary market, and we also examine the yield households and nonbank firms demand to buy these bills in the secondary market. We use data from real world...

We construct a slope factor from changes in federal funds futures of different horizons. Slope predicts stock returns at the weekly frequency: faster monetary policy easing positively predicts excess returns. Investors can achieve increases in weekly Sharpe ratios of 20% conditioning on the...

A consistent empirical feature of bond yields is that term premia are, on average, positive. The majority of theoretical explanations for this observation have viewed the term premia through the lens of the consumption based capital asset pricing model. In contrast, we harken to an older...

This paper assesses the change in Federal Reserve policy introduced in 1999, with the publication of statements about the outlook for monetary policy (and later about the balance of risks) immediately after each FOMC meeting. We find that markets anticipated monetary policy decisions equally...

The paper assesses the communication strategies of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank and their effectiveness. We find that the effectiveness of communication is not independent from the decisionmaking process in the committee. The paper shows that the Federal...

The paper shows that central bank communication is a key determinant of the market’s ability to anticipate monetary policy decisions and the future path of interest rates. Comparing communication policies by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the ECB since 1999, we find that...