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Working Paper
Interest Rate Surprises: A Tale of Two Shocks
Interest rate surprises around FOMC announcements reveal both the surprise in the monetary policy stance (the pure policy shock) and interest rate movements driven by exogenous information about the economy from the central bank (the information shock). In order to disentangle the effects of these two shocks, we use interest rate changes on days of macroeconomic data releases. On these release dates, there are no pure policy shocks, which allows us to identify the impact of information shocks and thereby distill pure policy shocks from interest rate surprises around FOMC announcements. Our ...
Report
Do Monetary Policy Announcements Shift Household Expectations?
We use a decade of daily survey data from Gallup to study how monetary policy influences households’ beliefs about economic conditions. We first document that public confidence in the state of the economy reacts instantaneously to certain types of macroeconomic news. Next, we show that surprises to the federal funds target rate are among the news that have statistically significant and instantaneous effects on economic confidence. Specifically, we find that a surprise increase in the target rate robustly leads to an immediate decline in household confidence, at odds with previous findings ...
Report
Announcement-Specific Decompositions of Unconventional Monetary Policy Shocks and Their Macroeconomic Effects
I propose to identify announcement-specific decompositions of asset price changes into monetary policy shocks exploiting heteroskedasticity in intraday data. This approach accommodates both changes in the nature of shocks and the state of the economy across announcements, allowing me to explicitly compare shocks across announcements. I compute decompositions with respect to Fed Funds, forward guidance, asset purchase, and Fed information shocks for 2007-19. Only a handful of announcements spark significant shocks. Both forward guidance and asset purchase shocks lower corporate yields and ...
Working Paper
How Oil Shocks Propagate: Evidence on the Monetary Policy Channel
Using high-frequency responses of oil futures prices to prominent oil market news, we estimate the effects of oil supply news shocks when systematic monetary policy is switched off by the zero lower bound (ZLB) and when it is not (normal periods) in Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We find that negative oil supply news shocks are less contractionary (and even expansionary) at the ZLB compared to normal periods. Inflation expectations increase during both periods, while the short nominal interest rates remain constant at the ZLB, pointing to the importance of monetary policy ...