We decompose unexpected movements in the stock market returns of 40 countries into different news components to assess why expansionary US monetary policy surprises are good news for stock markets. Our results suggest that prior to the zero lower bound (ZLB) period, federal funds rate surprises affect foreign stock markets mainly because such surprises are associated with news about future real interest rates. The effects of forward guidance surprises are negligible. At the ZLB, large-scale asset purchases (LSAP) reflect more than commitment to forward guidance. LSAP surprises constitute cash-flow news, while unanticipated forward guidance primarily reflects real interest rate news.
We study the implementation and effectiveness of Operation Twist, which represents the origin of today's unconventional monetary policy measures. Operation Twist serves as a perfect laboratory to assess the usefulness of such balance sheet policies because at that time interest rates were not at their lower bound and the economy was not in a historic turmoil. We assess the actions of the Fed and the Treasury under Operation Twist based on balance sheet data and evaluate the success of the operation using modern time series techniques. We find that the joint policy actions, despite being of rather moderate scale, were effective in compressing the long-short spreads of Treasury bond rates.
We study the bank lending channel in Switzerland over three decades using unbalanced quarterly bank-individual data spanning 1987 to 2016. In contrast to the usual empirical approach, we take an agnostic stance on which bank characteristic drives the heterogenous lending response to interest rate changes. In addition, our empirical model allows for a changing lending reaction occurring over time in a state-dependent manner. Our results are consistent with the existence of a bank lending channel, which is however muted in specific periods. Such episodes are characterized by increased economic uncertainty, which negatively impacts loan growth.
We assess the effects of financial shocks on inflation, and to what extent financial shocks can account for the "missing disinflation" during the Great Recession. We apply a Bayesian vector autoregressive model to US data and identify financial shocks through a combination of narrative and short-run sign restrictions. Our main finding is that contractionary financial shocks temporarily increase inflation. This result withstands a large battery of robustness checks. Negative financial shocks help therefore to explain why inflation did not drop more sharply in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Our analysis suggests that higher borrowing costs after negative financial shocks can account for the modest decrease in inflation after the financial crisis. A policy implication is that financial shocks act as supply-type shocks, moving output and inflation in opposite directions, thereby worsening the trade-off for a central bank with a dual mandate.
