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Working Paper
Financial Market Effects of FOMC Communication: Evidence from a New Event-Study Database
This paper introduces the U.S. Monetary Policy Event-Study Database (USMPD), a novel, public, and regularly updated dataset of financial market data around Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) policy announcements, press conferences, and minutes releases. Using the rich high-frequency data in the USMPD, we document several new empirical findings. Large monetary policy surprises have made a comeback in recent years, and post-meeting press conferences have become the most important source of policy news. Monetary policy surprises have pronounced negative effects on breakeven inflation based on ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Uncertainty and Monetary Policy Surprises
Monetary policy uncertainty affects the transmission of monetary policy shocks to longer-term nominal and real yields. For a given monetary policy shock, the reaction of yields is more pronounced when the level of monetary policy uncertainty is low. Primary dealers and other investors adjust their interest rate positions more when monetary policy uncertainty is low than when uncertainty is high. These portfolio adjustments likely explain the larger pass-through of a monetary policy shock to bond yields when uncertainty is low. These findings shed new light on the role that monetary policy ...
Working Paper
Delphic and Odyssean Monetary Policy Shocks: Evidence from the Euro Area
What drives the strong reaction of financial markets to central bank communication on the days of policy decisions? We highlight the role of two factors that we identify from high-frequency monetary surprises: news on future macroeconomic conditions (Delphic shocks) and news on future monetary policy shocks (Odyssean shocks). These two shocks move the yield curve in the same direction but have opposite effects on financial conditions and macroeconomic expectations. A drop in future interest rates that is associated with a negative Delphic (Odyssean) shock is perceived as being contractionary ...
Report
Interest Rate Surprises When the Fed Doesn’t Speak
The predictability of monetary policy surprises based on past, public information has been interpreted in two related yet fundamentally different ways. The “Fed information effect” posits that it arises due to markets updating their view of the economy, based on signals implicitly revealed by the FOMC. The “Fed reaction to news” explanation posits that markets update their view of the FOMC’s reaction function instead. We show that interest rate surprises calculated around macroeconomic releases exhibit the same predictability pattern as monetary policy surprises. Since these occur ...