Search Results
Working Paper
Unconventional Monetary Policy and International Risk Premia
We assess the relationship between monetary policy, foreign exchange risk premia and term premia at the zero lower bound. We estimate a structural VAR including U.S. and foreign interest rates and exchange rates, and identify monetary policy shocks through a method that uses these surprises as the crucial "external instrument" that achieves identification without having to use implausible short-run restrictions. This allows us to measure effects of policy shocks on expectations, and hence risk premia. U.S. monetary policy easing shocks lower domestic and foreign bond risk premia, lead to ...
Working Paper
Interconnectedness in the Corporate Bond Market
Does interconnectedness improve market quality? Yes.We develop an alternative network structure, the assets network: assets are connected if they are held by the same investors. We use several large datasets to build the assets network for the corporate bond market. Through careful identification strategies based on the COVID-19 shock and “fallen angels,” we find that interconnectedness improves market quality especially during stress periods. Our findings contribute to the debate on the role of interconnectedness in financial markets and show that highly interconnected corporate bonds ...
Working Paper
Exchange rates dependence: what drives it?
Exchange rate movements are difficult to predict but there appear to be discernible patterns in how currencies jointly appreciate or depreciate against the dollar. In this paper, we study the dependence structure of a number of exchange rate pairs against the dollar. We employ a conditional copula approach to recover the joint distributions for pairs of exchange rates and study both the correlation and the upper and lower tail dependence of these distributions. We analyze changes in dependence measures over time, and we investigate whether these measures are affected by the business cycle or ...
Working Paper
Fed Communication, News, Twitter, and Echo Chambers
We estimate monetary policy surprises (sentiment) from the perspective of three different textual sources: direct central bank communication (FOMC statements and press conferences), news articles, and Twitter posts during FOMC announcement days. Textual sentiment across sources is highly correlated, but there are times when news and Twitter sentiment substantially disagree with the sentiment conveyed by the central bank. We find that sentiment estimated using news articles correlates better with daily U.S. Treasury yield changes than the sentiment extracted directly from Fed communication, ...
Working Paper
Is the Intrinsic Value of Macroeconomic News Announcements Related to their Asset Price Impact?
The literature documents a heterogeneous asset price response to macroeconomic news announcements. We explain this variation with a novel measure of the intrinsic value of an announcement - the announcement's ability to nowcast GDP growth, inflation, and the Federal Funds Target Rate-and decompose it into the announcement's relation to fundamentals, a timeliness premium, and a revision premium. We find that differences in intrinsic value can explain a significant fraction of the variation in the announcements' price impact on Treasury bond yields. The announcements' timeliness and relation to ...
Working Paper
Has international financial co-movement changed? Emerging markets in the 2007-2009 financial crisis
Emerging market (EM) assets have historically been regarded as inherently risky and particularly vulnerable to international shocks that result in a general increase in investor risk perceptions. In this paper, we assess the ongoing relevance of this view by examining the linkages between EM and non-EM stock and bond markets in the past two decades, with a focus on how these relationships played out during the global financial crisis of 2007-2009. We evaluate how these linkages have evolved over the period 1992-2009, through statistical tests of whether the volatility of EM financial markets ...
Working Paper
Words Speak as Loudly as Actions: Central Bank Communication and the Response of Equity Prices to Macroeconomic Announcements
While the literature has already widely documented the effects of macroeconomic news announcements on asset prices, as well as their asymmetric impact during good and bad times, we focus on the reaction to news based on the description of the state of the economy as painted by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) statements. We develop a novel FOMC sentiment index using textual analysis techniques, and find that news has a bigger (smaller) effect on equity prices during bad (good) times as described by the FOMC sentiment index. Our analysis suggests that the FOMC sentiment index offers a ...
Report
The Financial Stability Implications of Digital Assets
The value of assets in the digital ecosystem has grown rapidly amid periods of high volatility. Does the digital financial system create new potential challenges to financial stability? This paper explores this question using the Federal Reserve’s framework for analyzing vulnerabilities in the traditional financial system. The digital asset ecosystem has recently proven itself to be highly fragile. However, adverse digital asset market shocks have had limited spillovers to the traditional financial system. Currently, the digital asset ecosystem does not provide significant financial ...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic and Financial Risks: A Tale of Mean and Volatility
We study the joint conditional distribution of GDP growth and corporate credit spreads using a stochastic volatility VAR. Our estimates display significant cyclical co-movement in uncertainty (the volatility implied by the conditional distributions), and risk (the probability of tail events) between the two variables. We also find that the interaction between two shocks--a main business cycle shock as in Angeletos et al. (2020) and a main financial shock--is crucial to account for the variation in uncertainty and risk, especially around crises. Our results highlight the importance of using ...
Working Paper
Real-time measurement of business conditions
We construct a framework for measuring economic activity in real time (e.g., minute-by-minute), using a variety of stock and flow data observed at mixed frequencies. Specifically, we propose a dynamic factor model that permits exact filtering, and we explore the efficacy of our methods both in a simulation study and in a detailed empirical example.