Search Results
Report
Monetary policy surprises and interest rates: evidence from the Fed funds futures markets
This paper estimates the impact of monetary policy actions on bill, note, and bond yields, using data from the futures market for federal funds to separate changes in the target funds rate into anticipated and unanticipated components. Bond rates' response to anticipated changes is essentially zero, while their response to unanticipated movements is large and highly significant. Surprise policy actions have little effect on near-term expectations of future actions, which helps explain the failure of the expectations hypothesis on the short end of the yield curve.
Report
Does talk matter after all? Inflation targeting and central bank behavior
Interpretations of inflation targeting (IT) have ranged widely, from ?inflation-only targeting? without regard for output, to cheap talk without effect, to transparency increasing flexibility without cost. We characterize five interpretations of the adoption if IT as shifts between strategies in a conventional model of monetary time-inconsistency. Their implications for central bank behavior are compared to the time-series properties of inflation, and the response of interest rates to inflation movements, for three countries adopting it in the early 1990s. ; There is no evidence that IT ...
Conference Paper
What explains the stock market's reaction to Federal Reserve policy?
This paper analyzes the impact of unanticipated changes in the Federal funds target on equity prices, with the aim of both estimating the size of the typical reaction, and understanding the reasons for the market's response. On average over the May 1989 to December 2001 sample, a "typical" unanticipated 25 basis point rate cut has been associated with a 1.3 percent increase in the S&P 500 composite index. The estimated response varies considerably across industries, with the greatest sensitivity observed in cyclical industries like construction, and the smallest in mining and utilities. ...
Journal Article
Tracking Midwest manufacturing and productivity growth
Working Paper
Money, income, prices and interest rates after the 1980s
Working Paper
Can VAR's describe monetary policy?
Recent research has questioned the usefulness of Vector Autoregression (VAR) models as a description of monetary policy, especially in light of the low correlation between forecast errors from VARs and those derived from Fed funds futures rates. This paper presents three findings on VARs' ability to describe monetary policy. First, the correlation between forecasts errors is a misleading measure of how closely the VAR forecast mimics the futures market's. In particular, the low correlation is partly due to a week positive correlation between the VAR forecasts and the futures market errors. ...