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Working Paper
Market-based measures of monetary policy expectations
A number of recent papers have used different financial market instruments to measure near-term expectations of the federal funds rate and the high-frequency changes in these instruments around FOMC announcements to measure monetary policy shocks. This paper evaluates the empirical success of a variety of financial market instruments in predicting the future path of monetary policy. All of the instruments we consider provide forecasts that are clearly superior to those of standard time series models at all of the horizons considered. Among financial market instruments, we find that federal ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy alternatives at the zero bound: an empirical assessment
The success over the years in reducing inflation and, consequently, the average level of nominal interest rates has increased the likelihood that the nominal policy interest rate may become constrained by the zero lower bound. When that happens, a central bank can no longer stimulate aggregate demand by further interest-rate reductions and must rely on "non-standard" policy alternatives. To assess the potential effectiveness of such policies, we analyze the behavior of selected asset prices over short periods surrounding central bank statements or other types of financial or economic news ...
Working Paper
The TIPS yield curve and inflation compensation
For over ten years, the U.S. Treasury has issued index-linked debt. Federal Reserve Board staff have fitted a yield curve to these indexed securities at the daily frequency from the start of 1999 to the present. This paper describes the methodology that is used and makes the estimates public. Comparison with the corresponding nominal yield curve allows measures of inflation compensation (or breakeven inflation rates) to be computed. We discuss the interpretation of inflation compensation and its relationship to inflation expectations and uncertainty, offering some empirical evidence that ...
Working Paper
Spillovers across U.S. financial markets
Movements in the prices of different assets are likely to directly influence one another. This paper identifies the contemporaneous interactions between asset prices in U.S. financial markets by relying on the heteroskedasticity in their movements. In particular, we estimate a "structural-form GARCH" model that includes the short-term interest rate, the long-term interest rate, and the stock market. The results indicate that there are strong contemporaneous interactions between these variables. Accounting for this behavior is critical for interpreting daily changes in asset prices and for ...
Journal Article
Treasury inflation-indexed debt: a review of the U.S. experience
This article describes the evolution of Treasury inflation-indexed debt securities (TIIS) since their introduction in 1997. Over most of this period, TIIS yields have been surprisingly high relative to those on comparable nominal Treasury securities, with the spread between the nominal and indexed yields falling well below survey measures of long-run inflation expectations. The authors argue that the low relative valuation of TIIS may have reflected investor difficulty adjusting to a new asset class, supply trends, and the lower liquidity of indexed debt. In addition, investors may have had a ...
Working Paper
Using Treasury STRIPS to measure the yield curve
Treasury STRIPS derived from coupon payments of notes and bonds provide an effective reading of the zero-coupon yield curve. Among their advantages, coupon STRIPS are zero-coupon securities, have a complete range of maturities, and are fungible, which appears to make the coupon STRIPS yield curve relatively smooth. Yields on coupon STRIPS are compared to the zero-coupon yield curves derived from notes and bonds under the Nelson-Siegel and the Fisher-Nychka-Zervos methods. The results point to some shortcomings of these approaches and indicate that the zero-coupon yield curve could be ...
Working Paper
Interest-rate smoothing and optimal monetary policy: a review of recent empirical evidence
The Federal Reserve and other central banks tend to change short-term interest rates in sequences of small steps in the same direction and reverse the direction of interest rate movements only infrequently. These characteristics, often referred to as interest-rate smoothing, have led to criticism that policy responds too little and too late to macroeconomic developments, suggesting to some observers that the Federal Reserve has an objective of minimizing interest-rate volatility. This paper, however, argues that the observed degree of interest-rate smoothing may well represent optimal ...
Working Paper
The U.S. Treasury yield curve: 1961 to the present
The discount function, which determines the value of all future nominal payments, is the most basic building block of finance and is usually inferred from the Treasury yield curve. It is therefore surprising that researchers and practitioners do not have available to them a long history of high-frequency yield curve estimates. This paper fills that void by making public the Treasury yield curve estimates of the Federal Reserve Board at a daily frequency from 1961 to the present. We use a well-known and simple smoothing method that is shown to fit the data very well. The resulting estimates ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Monetary Policy on Asset Prices
Estimating the response of asset prices to changes in monetary policy is complicated by the endogeneity of policy decisions and the fact that both interest rates and asset prices react to numerous other variables. This paper develops a new estimator that is based on the heteroskedasticity that exists in high frequency data. We show that the response of asset prices to changes in monetary policy can be identified based on the increase in the variance of policy shocks that occurs on days of FOMC meetings and of the Chairman's semi-annual monetary policy testimony to Congress. The identification ...
Working Paper
The impact of monetary policy on asset prices
Estimating the response of asset prices to changes in monetary policy is complicated by the endogeneity of policy decisions and the fact that both interest rates and asset prices react to numerous other variables. This paper develops a new estimator that is based on the heteroskedasticity that exists in high frequency data. We show that the response of asset prices to changes in monetary policy can be identified based on the increase in the variance of policy shocks that occurs on days of FOMC meetings and of the Chairman's semi-annual monetary policy testimony to Congress. The identification ...