Mark Kerssenfischer Livres

Central bank announcements move financial markets. The response of inflation and growth expectations, on the other hand, is often small or even counterintuitive. Based on tick-by-tick futures prices on bonds and stock prices, I confirm these seemingly puzzling results for the euro area and provide evidence that they are due to central bank information effects. That is, ECB announcements convey information not only about monetary policy, but also about economic fundamentals. I separate these „information shocks“ from „pure policy shocks“ via sign restrictions and find intuitive effects of both shocks on a wide set of financial market prices and survey measures of economic expectations.

Dynamic factor models and external instrument identification are two recent advances in the empirical macroeconomic literature. This paper combines the two approaches in order to study the effects of monetary policy shocks. I use this novel framework to re-examine the effects found by Forni and Gambetti (2010, JME) in a recursively-identified DFM. Considering the fundamental differences between the identifying assumptions, the results are overall strikingly similar. Importantly, this finding stands in stark contrast to traditional VAR models, which yield decisively different results in the two identification schemes. This highlights the importance of using extended information sets to properly identify monetary policy shocks.