Historical estimates of the informational content in the yield curve may not be relevant after a change in monetary policy. This study uses a small dynamic rational expectations model with staggered price setting to study how monetary policy affects the relation between nominal interest rates, inflation expectations, and real interest rates. The benchmark parameters, including the Fed's loss function parameters, are estimated by maximum likelihood on quarterly U.S. data. The policy experiments include stronger inflation targeting and more active monetary policy.
This paper analyzes how bond option prices are affected by different types of monetary policy. Analytical results from a general equilibrium model with sticky wages show that employment or output targeting typically give lower bond option prices than inflation targeting.
The British pound left the ERM on 16 September 1992 after a period of turbulence. UK monetary policy soon shifted to lower short interest rates and an inflation target was announced. This paper uses daily option prices to estimate how the market's probability distribution of the future marks/pound exchange rate and UK and German interest rates changed over the summer and autumn of 1992. The results show, among other things, how various policy decisions affected the market's assessment of the probabilities of realignments and lending rate cuts.
The difference between nominal and real interest rates (break-even inflation) is often used to gauge the market's inflation expectations-and has become an important tool in monetary policy analysis. However, break-even inflation can move in response to shifts in inflation risk premia and liquidity premia as well as to changes in expected inflation. This paper sheds light on this issue by analyzing the evolution of U.S. break-even inflation from 1997 to mid-2008. Regression results show that survey data on inflation uncertainty and proxies for liquidity premia are important factors.
Stein's lemma is extended to the case where asset returns have skewed and leptokurtic distributions. The risk premium is still the negative of the covariance of the excess return with the log stochastic discount factor. The risk-neutral distribution has a simple form but is a nontrivial transformation of the physical distribution.
Survey and option data are used to take a fresh look at the equity premium puzzle. Survey data on equity returns (Livingston survey) shows much lower expected excess returns than ex post data. At the same time, option data suggests that investors tend to overestimate the volatility of equity returns. Both facts contribute towards solving the puzzle. However, data on beliefs about output volatility (Survey of Professional Forecasters) shows marked overconfidence. On balance, the equity premium is somewhat less of a puzzle than in ex post data.
