The present paper studies the consequences of conflicting narratives for the transmission of monetary policy shocks. We focus on conflict between the presidents of the ECB and the Bundesbank, the main protagonists of monetary policy in the euro area, who often disagreed on policy over the past...

Monetary policy increasingly relies on steering market expectations about future policy. This paper identifies a monetary policy news shock based on a VAR model. A monetary news shock is equivalent to new information about the Fed's future monetary policy becoming available today. One example of...

With the Federal Funds rate approaching the zero lower bound, the U.S. Federal Reserve adopted a range of unconventional monetary policy measures known as Quantitative Easing (QE). Quantifying the impact QE has on the real economy, however, is not straightforward as standard tools such as VAR...

In order to fight the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, monetary and fiscal policy announced a large variety of support packages which are often unprecedented in size. In this paper, we provide an empirical analysis of the responses of European financial markets to these policy...

This paper studies the non-linear response of the term structure of interest rates to monetary policy shocks. We show that uncertainty about monetary policy changes the way the term structure responds to monetary policy. A policy tightening leads to a significantly smaller increase in long-term...

In this paper, we study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in estimated panel VAR models for 92 countries. The large cross section of countries allows us to shed light on the heterogeneity of the responses of stock markets and NO2 emissions as high-frequency measures of economic activity. We...

Policymakers imposed constraints on public life in order to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, fiscal and monetary policy implemented a large range of of expansionary measures to limit the economic consequences of the pandemic and stimulate the recovery. In this paper, we assess...

The adoption of a credible monetary policy regime such as inflation targeting is known to reduce the persistence of inflation fluctuations. This conclusion, however, is derived from aggregate inflation or sectoral inflation rates, not from regional inflation data. This paper studies the regional...

It is well known that a tightening or easing of the United States' monetary policy affects financial markets in emerging economies. This paper argues that uncertainty about future monetary policy is a separate transmission channel. We focus on the taper tantrum episode in 2013, a period with an...

In this paper we analyze the extent to which peoples' changing beliefs about the timing of the exit from Quantitative Easing ("tapering") impact asset prices. To quantify beliefs of market participants, we use data from Twitter, the social media application. Our data set covers the entire...