Monetary Policy Announcements Research Articles

Dispelling the shadow of fiscal dominance? Fiscal and monetary announcement effects for euro area sovereign spreads in the corona pandemic

We use event study regressions to compare the impact of monetary versus fiscal policy announcements on euro area government bond spreads in the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout our specifications and robustness checks, we detect larger effects for monetary than for fiscal announcements. Among monetary policy instruments, the PEPP has the largest spread compressing effects. Comparing the announcement effects for fiscal crisis tools, Next Generation EU shows significant results in contrast to news on pure loan instruments. The relaxation of European fiscal rules through the activation of the emergency-escape clause under the Stability and Growth Pact is associated with rising spreads. We conclude that the stability of euro area bond markets in the presence of a severe solvency shock depends to a large extent on the Eurosystem’s unconstrained sovereign bond purchases. Our results suggest that fiscal support can play a stabilizing role if it includes, like Next Generation EU, a significant transfer component.

Price effects of unconventional monetary policy announcements on European securities markets

This paper assesses the effects of the unconventional monetary policies taken by the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve on European securities markets. Using the event study methodology, we evaluate the price reaction of market indices around the announcement dates from 2008 to 2018. Our results show that the impact is mixed on European government bonds, but positive and significant on stocks, with some evidence of international spillovers. We also find that coordinated policy actions exert a stronger influence than individual measures. Furthermore, the announcements generate surprise effects, albeit with a different magnitude and direction.

Brexit news propagation in financial systems: multidimensional visibility networks for market volatility dynamics

In this paper, we propose a multivariate procedure based on multidimensional visibility graphs to detect changes in the market volatility of UK financial indices, considered both before and after Brexit main events. We produce a graph-theoretical representation of volatility time series derived from equity indexes, government rates and currencies to investigate the behavior of the aggregate market volatility through the use of global centrality measures. By employing a stylized agent-based model, we show that the proposed approach is able to discriminate between periods of high and low volatility, both in the temporal dimension and cross-sectionally among multiple time series. We aim at recognizing whether external news related to the Brexit process could induce significant ‘after-shocks’ (and also ‘pre-shocks’) in the system, by producing dynamic relaxation in the values of centrality measures, in line with the cascade effects described by the Omori earthquake law. In particular, high volatility cascades dissipate into the market via power-law relaxation. When compared with other categories of events, such as Bank of England monetary policy announcements, we observe significant market inefficiency in processing Brexit related news. We also find that strong market surprise related to specific Brexit news or a correct discount of some Brexit announcements can produce an inverse Omori law exhibiting convex relaxation.

Fed tapering announcements: Impact on Middle Eastern and African financial markets

We study the impact of the announcements of “tapering” (exit from the unconventional monetary policies of the Federal Reserve) on a sample of 16 countries of the Middle East and Africa region. The events under study are the announcements of the Federal Open Market Committee in the context of meetings and minutes during the tapering period (2013/01–2015/04). We compare the impact on these countries with that on three emerging and advanced economies control groups. We find that the countries under study, despite a lower level of financial development, are also characterized by significant announcement effects. The dates of significant announcements are more similar to Western Europe than to the other emerging economies, which reflects major economic ties with Europe. Domestic inflation and FDI have the most significant direct and interaction effects. In particular, the direct effect of FDI is favorable, but their indirect effect is unfavorable, as in the literature on emerging countries where financial development frequently increases vulnerabilities to the impact of international monetary policy announcements. More generally, this result points to the macroeconomic issue of the absorptive capacity necessary to achieve the benefits of FDI (Durham, 2004).

Portfolio investment and U.S. monetary policy announcements: An event study analysis using high-frequency data from Mexico

We study how unconventional monetary policy announcements affected the entry of foreign investment in debt and equity in Mexico, placing special focus on announcements related to the third QE program and the taper tantrum episode. A novel dataset on daily debt and equity flows, that maps Balance of Payments data quite well, allows this paper to provide a better insight into movements of capital. The results suggest that both equity and debt flows reacted immediately to unexpected U.S. monetary policy announcements, particularly if these are considered as bad news by investors. In turn, results using weekly data support the idea that investors interested in fixed income instruments move more prudently than those interested in equity which react quickly.

International spillovers of forward guidance shocks

SummaryWe estimate a two‐country model of the United States and Canada over the post 2009 sample to study the cross‐country spillovers of forward guidance shocks. To do so, we propose a method to identify forward guidance shocks during the fixed interest rate regime. The estimated forward guidance shocks coincide with significant U.S. monetary policy announcements such as the introduction of calendar‐based guidance in 2011. While a 2‐quarter expansionary forward guidance shock decreases Canadian output by about 0.2% to 0.4% on impact, we find that the United States and Canada were both better off by responding with expansionary monetary policy to the large contractionary shocks that took place during the Great Recession. The central message of our paper is that the focus on whether monetary policy spillovers are expansionary or contractionary is incomplete. What matters is whether the combined monetary policy response is stabilizing in aggregate.

Central bank's communication and markets' reactions: Polish evidence

PurposeThis study contributes to the pool of knowledge about the impact of monetary policy communication of central banks on financial instruments' prices and assets' value in emerging markets.Design/methodology/approachEmpirical analysis is executed using the National Bank of Poland (NBP) announcements about its monetary policy covering the data from the broad financial market in its three main segments: stock market, foreign exchange market and bonds market. The reactions are measured relative to the changes in the NBP announcements and also with respect to investors' expectations. Autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) models with dummy variables are used as the main methodological tool.FindingsBonds market and foreign exchange market are the most sensitive market segments, while interest rate and money supply are the most influential types of announcements. The changes of the revealed new macroeconomic figures had more impact on assets' prices movements than the deviations from their expectations. Moreover, greater diversity of the Monetary Policy Council (MPC) members' opinions on the voted motions, captured in the MPC voting reports, is associated with more cases of statistically significant NBP communication events.Practical implicationsThe findings have direct relevance for fund managers, portfolio analysts, investors and also for financial market regulators.Originality/valueThe results provide novel evidence about how the emerging financial market responds to monetary policy announcements. They help understand the nature of the impact of public information on financial assets' valuation and on movements of their prices, analysed comprehensively in three market segments, in the emerging market environment.

The response of Brent crude oil to the European central bank monetary policy

This paper examines the impact of European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy decisions on oil prices and liquidity using an event study with intraday data. We analyse the period from January 1999 to December 2020, which includes the financial crisis that started in August 2007. Our results show a significant response for oil returns only during the financial crisis. Specifically, we find that Brent crude oil futures’ returns responded negatively to unexpected variations in the Italian risk premium as a measure of unconventional monetary policy actions – and positively to unexpected variations in short-term interest rates. That is, an unexpected increase in short-term interest rates and reductions in the Italian risk premium are taken as positive signals anticipating the end of the financial crisis. Moreover, as Brent is priced in US dollars, we have tested if the Brent response is due to the exchange rate response. We find that the null hypothesis of equal response from Brent and the exchange rate to ECB monetary policy announcements cannot be rejected. These are important results for monetary policy makers and financial agents.

Time-of-Day and Day-of-Week Variations in Amazon Mechanical Turk Survey Responses

Social science research studies are frequently conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). I use data from four previous economics studies conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, with a total of 2780 observations, to study how participant characteristics and behaviors depend on the day of the week and time of day of participation. Most notably, Saturday participants are older, less educated, and more likely to have low income compared to other participants. Controlling for demographics, Saturday participants are more likely to answer objective knowledge questions correctly and to provide reasonable inflation forecasts, less likely to provide don't know responses, and less likely to use social media as a primary source of economic news. Night participants are less likely to get economic news from print sources such as newspapers. Standard data cleaning procedures typically neither reduce nor exacerbate these patterns. Implications of these findings are especially important for researchers designing high-frequency surveys of macroeconomic expectations intended to enable identification of the effects of monetary policy announcements or other events of interest via a high frequency approach. Systematic day-of-week variation in respondents' knowledge and reported expectations, if not properly accounted for, could threaten such an identification scheme.

The cross section of the monetary policy announcement premium

Using the expected option-implied variance reduction to measure the sensitivity of stock returns to monetary policy announcement surprises, this paper shows monetary policy announcements require significant risk compensation in the cross section of equity returns. We develop a parsimonious equilibrium model in which FOMC announcements reveal the Federal Reserve’s private information about its interest-rate target, which affects the private sector’s expectation about the long-run growth-rate of the economy. Our model accounts for the dynamics of implied variances and the cross section of the monetary policy announcement premium realized around FOMC announcement days.

Volatility forecasting in European government bond markets

In this paper we examine the predictive power of the heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) model for the return volatility of major European government bond markets. The results from HAR-type volatility forecasting models show that past short- and medium-term volatility are significant predictors of the term structure of the intraday volatility of European bonds with maturities ranging from 1 year up to 30 years. When we decompose bond market volatility into its continuous and discontinuous (jump) component, we find that the jump component is a significant predictor. Moreover, we show that feedback from past short-term volatility to forecasts of future volatility is stronger in the days that precede monetary policy announcements.

Monetary policy announcements and bank lending: Do banks’ refinancing markets matter?

How do bank loans respond to monetary policy shocks? The bank lending channel holds that banks' refinancing costs are crucial. This paper shows that what ultimately matters are shifts in the supply of funds available to banks. We use a structural VAR and a novel approach that combines data from the market for large certificates of deposits (jumbo CDs) and U.S. macroeconomic data from 1990Q2 to 2016Q4. We identify supply shifts on the jumbo CD market as situations when the volume and price of jumbo CDs respond with opposite signs to policy shocks. Demand shifts are characterized by responses in the same direction. We find that only if policy shocks are associated with a lower supply of funds available to banks, then loan volumes fall immediately and persistently, in line with the bank lending channel. In contrast, loan volumes remain unresponsive if policy shocks shift banks’ demand for funds.

How much do the central bank announcements matter on financial market? Application of the rule-based trading system approach

This paper proposes a rule-based trading system to investigate how much the central bank’s announcements matter on a financial market. We design a novel investment strategy and we simulate trades in order to quantify their profitability in the out–of–sample period using the data from a broad financial market in Poland spanning across 3 segments: stock market, foreign exchange market and bonds market. Our results show that the individual transactions delivered profits in 72.7% cases. The overall profitability across all events and all trading horizons was positive in as many as 63.6% cases. Although the financial market in Poland was only moderately sensitive to the NBP central bank’s communication, the identified types of the monetary policy announcements are economically significant and very useful for the investors, who can trade based on them and exploit them directly in the design of the rule-based trading strategies.

Corporate bond market reactions to quantitative easing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using transaction data from the first half of 2020, we examine the reaction of corporate credit spreads to the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy announcements. We find evidence that the bond markets are segmented across credit ratings, which led to different initial reactions across bonds with different credit ratings but spread across various sectors of corporate bonds over the longer event window. To quantify the default risk channel of quantitative easing, we apply the variance decomposition approach to credit spreads and find that a significant fraction of credit spread changes indeed correspond to reduced default risk caused by the corporate bond purchase program. In contrast, we only find mixed evidence for the liquidity channel driving the market reaction.

Central Bank Communication and Forward Guidance Shocks

Does it matter what the central bank had said during a monetary policy announcement? The paper proposes a new approach to identifying the effects of forward guidance taking into account what the central bank had said and how financial markets perceived it. I use computational linguistic methods to disentangle the topics the central bank was talking about during its announcements. Moreover, I found that newspapers cover monetary policy announcements and positivity/negativity of the coverage might serve as a proxy to what the markets have heard during the announcements. The study finds that the markets react to monetary policy announcements by incorporating the new information in the yield curve. Furthermore, financial markets are forward-looking and obtain information before its publication in newspapers.

Sieve estimation of option-implied state price density

This paper proposes a nonparametric estimator for the state price density implied by a single cross-section of European options with different strikes and the same maturity. The proposed estimator has two distinctive features. First, it extracts information from both call and put options, as opposed to only call options. Second, it does not require estimating any second-order derivative; instead, it solves a constrained and penalized linear regression. The asymptotic analysis faces two challenges because the state price density is defined by a Fredholm integral equation of the first kind with an unbounded support, and the kernel function is unbounded and non-differentiable. We address these challenges by exploiting the structure of the option pricing problem. After establishing the estimator’s consistency and convergence rate, we apply it to estimate the state price densities implied by the S&P500 index options and those by the VIX options. The sample period includes the recent financial crisis and the Great Recession, during which the turbulent market conditions imposed substantial challenges on the estimation. We show that the estimator can work with both daily and high-frequency observations. We also study whether the various features of this density can predict future asset returns and obtain positive findings. Finally, we apply the method to examine the causal effects of monetary policy announcements on the financial market, using high-frequency data.

Effects of monetary policy announcements on term premia in the euro area during the COVID-19 pandemic

We study the effects of the announcement of the ECB's Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) on ten-year government bond term premia in eleven euro-area countries, while controlling for other ECB statements. We find that the term premia of government bonds in euro area countries with higher sovereign risk, as measured by sovereign CDS spreads, decreased more in response to the announcement of the PEPP. This occurred after these term premia had risen in response to a prior monetary policy press conference statement by the ECB president that the ECB was “not here to close spreads”.

GCC countries' market risk premia and US monetary policy announcements

PurposeThis paper aims to examine if the market risk premiums of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are particularly higher on prescheduled US monetary policy announcement days. The findings shed light on the causality relationship from the state of the global economy to the GCC equity markets as well as their integration with the rest of the world.Design/methodology/approachThe author takes the standard event-study approach, following Fama et al. (1969). As the announcement days are prescheduled, the impact of the announcements on the GCC markets' risk premia allows for test of causality, while other studies address predictability and association.FindingsThe author finds that excess returns are higher, both economically and statistically, on announcement days in most individual GCC countries and the region overall. Moreover, additional compensations may not appear on the exact days of announcement in a few countries; rather, on the days right before or after announcements, possibly due to information leakage or gradual diffusion. My results show that there is a causal relationship from the state of the global economy to the GCC equity markets' risk premia. This new evidence supports integration between the Gulf region's and the world's financial markets.Practical implicationsThe evidence of risk–return transmission from US monetary policy announcements to GCC countries' equity indices supports integration between the region's and the world's financial markets. The study results will help guide investors' and corporations' investing, capital budgeting and portfolio evaluation decisions.Originality/valueThis paper extends the announcement literature (Savor and Wilson 2013, 2014) by examining the responses of the GCC countries, the major players of the global oil markets. The empirical analysis documents a causal relationship from the state of the global economy, as revealed by US monetary policy announcements, to the GCC equity indices. This new evidence supports increased integration between the Gulf region and the world, a finding that investors and corporations should consider when making investing, capital budgeting and portfolio evaluation decisions.

The impact of the ECB’s monetary policy on corporate borrowing costs

This paper examines the impact of the ECB’s monetary policy on corporate borrowing costs. We use an event study method to assess and compare the effects of both conventional and unconventional monetary policy on Germany and French corporate bond market (credit spreads). The sample of our research consists of daily data collected during the period from 04 January 1999 to 27 February 2015. This period spans the pre-crisis which begins when the ECB has launched the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and became responsible for the monetary policy in the euro area. We find significantly negative relation between conventional surprise and corporate credit spreads. Moreover, we find that a raise in German non-financial credit spreads and French credit spreads domestic in response to the SMP announcement. The OMT lowers the German non-financial credit spreads, while it raises German bank credit spreads and French corporate credit spreads both domestic and bund for two sectors. Finally, the LTROs are associated with a raise in corporate credit spreads. Our findings are confirmed in robustness checks by changing the non-standard monetary policy announcements with monetary policy event dummies used as one variable.

Dynamic impact of the U.S. monetary policy on oil market returns and volatility

In this paper, we assess the dynamic impact of the U.S. monetary policy announcements on oil market futures returns and volatility. We use intra-day data for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil futures together with a time-varying modeling approach to study the nature of this dynamic impact. In addition, we also control for macroeconomic news shocks and separately study the response of good and bad realized volatility. Evidence suggests that there is a significant time variation in the response of oil returns, as well as its volatility to the Federal Reserve policy announcements. Broadly, we also find that higher (lower) uncertainty about Federal Reserve policy actions is associated with a weaker (stronger) impact of the surprise policy announcements on oil returns and volatility.