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The objective of this paper is to explore the sensitivity of industry‐specific stock returns to monetary policy and macroeconomic news. The paper looks at a range of industry‐specific South African stock market indices and evaluates the sensitivity of these indices to various unanticipated macroeconomic shocks.

The authors begin with an event study, which examines the immediate impact of macroeconomic shocks on the stock market indices, and then use a Bayesian vector autoregressive (BVAR) analysis, which provides insight into the dynamic effects of the shocks on the stock market indices, by allowing them to treat the shocks as exogenous through appropriate setting of priors defining the mean and variance of the parameters in the VAR.

The results from the event study indicate that with the exception of the gold mining index, where the CPI surprise plays a significant role, monetary surprise is the only variable that consistently negatively affects the stock returns significantly, both at the aggregate and sectoral levels. The BVAR model based on monthly data, however, indicates that, in addition to the monetary policy surprises, the CPI and PPI surprises also affect aggregate stock returns significantly. However, the effects of the CPI and PPI surprises are quite small in magnitude and are mainly experienced at shorter horizons immediately after the shock.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study conducted on South Africa which analyses the impact of a wide range of unanticipated macroeconomic shocks on stock returns. This paper improves on earlier efforts by using measures of monetary policy, as well as other macroeconomic news, which more cleanly isolates the unanticipated elements of the monetary policy variable and other macroeconomic indicators, in studying the impact of these surprises on stock returns in South Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to consider a monetary-jump model to measure the contribution of jumps to the total volatility of interest rates in the Brazilian interbank market and to assess the extent to which the central bank’s unanticipated monetary policy decisions are driving these jumps.

The authors use a sample of swap rates contracts with different maturities to estimate a mixture GARCH-jump model that disentangles two components of interest rate volatility: a GARCH-type specification that models conditional heteroskedasticity to account for the volatility during “normal” times and a Poisson process that models the occurrence of abrupt changes in interest rates.

The contribution of jumps to the total volatility is substantial, and monetary policy decisions partly explain the occurrence of those jumps. In particular, the authors find that the likelihood of a jump occurring during a meeting day of the Brazilian central bank’s monetary policy committee (COPOM) is higher in comparison to that of a non-meeting day.

The occurrence of jumps in the term structure of interest rates raises the question of the transmission mechanism of the monetary policy through the asset price channel as well as the relation between jumps and economic fundamentals.

Communication between the central bank and the market will affect expectations and asset values. If the central bank’s decisions generate fewer jumps, then the variance of the interest rate-linked asset values will also be reduced.

The paper employs a new approach to assess monetary policy surprises to a set of Brazilian interest rate data and relates the occurrence of jumps to the macroeconomic environment.

This paper provides an important perspective to the predictive capacity of Fed and European Central Bank (ECB) meeting dates and production announcements for the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) between Bitcoin and energy commodities returns and volatilities during the period from August 11, 2015 to March 31, 2018.

To assess empirically the unanticipated component of the US and ECB monetary policy, the authors pursue the Kuttner's approach and use the federal funds futures and the ECB funds futures to assess the surprise component. The authors use the approach of DCC as introduced by Engle (2002) during the period from August 11, 2015 to March 31, 2018.

The authors’ results suggest strong significant DCCs between Bitcoin and energy commodity markets if monetary policy surprises are incorporated in variance. These results confirmed the financialization of Bitcoin and commodity energy markets. Finally, the DCC between Bitcoin and energy commodity markets appears to respond considerably more in the case of Fed surprises than ECB surprises.

This study is a crucial topic for policymakers and portfolio risk managers.

The purpose of this paper is to present theoretical and empirical support that the fear component associated with rare events has an impact on risk premium and market returns.

Extension of jump-diffusion model to extract the fear component from representative agent risk aversion, Standard VAR and impulse response function analysis, Event study analysis.

The model implicates that investor fear of tail jumps in the financial market impacts equity risk premium. The empirical findings show both positive stock and monetary policy shocks decrease investor’s fear. It can be attributed to that a bullish stock market and an increase in interest rate reflects expanding economy, and it leads to a decrease in fear. Moreover, a surprise decline in the expected short-term rate has a mixed impact on tail risk aversion. A plausible explanation is that investors believe a surprise drop in an expected short-term rate reflects a fast deteriorating economic outlook during unconventional monetary policy period.

This paper provides theoretical framework to decompose risk aversion into two separate components: one component associated with daily volatility, and the fear component associated with rare events. The study uses risk premiums decomposed from Chicago Board Options Exchange volatility index as proxies for the two components of risk aversion, and then utilizes standard value at risk and event study analysis to show the fear component plays a role in risk premium and market return.

This chapter investigates the impact of policy interest rate news from the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) on stock returns and volatilities of U.S. NYSE and German DAX listed commercial banks. We find that Fed news has the most influence on both U.S. and German listed bank stocks and an unexpected policy rate increase (decrease) lowers (raises) returns and raises volatility in the majority of cases. On the other hand, ECB news generally increases bank stock volatility in the United States but has little impact within its own domestic banking industry. While our results for the U.S. listed banks confirm that their stock prices are more responsive in bad economic times and also during periods of monetary tightening, we find disparities for German banks suggesting that U.S. and European banking industries respond heterogeneously to monetary policy news but the Global Financial Crisis increased the sensitivity of all banks to monetary policy news.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings and the changes of the target rates on stock market uncertainty.

Multivariate regression analysis is applied to the historical data of VIX, FOMC meetings and target rates. Subtle relations are revealed by further categorizing the FOMC meetings into being scheduled and unscheduled and distinguishing the signs of the changes in VIX and target rates. CPI and the prime rate are used for robustness test.

The authors first examine the relation between FOMC meetings and target surprises; the results indicate that unscheduled FOMC meetings heavily impact the target surprises. Then, the authors investigate the relation between FOMC meetings and VIX changes; the results show that both unscheduled and scheduled FOMC meetings impact VIX, where the impacts of scheduled FOMC meetings are more substantial. The authors also analyze the responses of VIX to the target surprises, and the results reveal that there is an asymmetric effect of target surprises on VIX, where the influences of the scheduled positive target surprises are more significant. Finally, by examining the relation between the FOMC meeting and the risk-neutral density of the VIX option, the authors conclude that both KURT and SKEW are more affected by unscheduled FOMC meetings.

Deeper dimensions of the relations between VIX, FOMC meetings and target rates are analyzed and more insightful understandings of such relations are gained.

Indian monetary policy performed reasonably well in the past, while both strategy and operational framework were evolving on par with domestic financial and monetary markets. The purpose of this paper is to document how this good track record came to an abrupt stop in recent years as inflation rose sharply and, more worryingly, expected inflation followed suit.

This paper has analytical, empirical and policy dimensions. Given the recent surge in inflation in India, as well as in inflation expectations, a discussion of the role of monetary policy is needed. This is presented by resorting to survey evidence on expectations as well as to indirect evidence inferred from the market reactions to macroeconomic news.

The authors documented the unhinging of inflation expectations in India in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The evidence gathered leads to the conclusion that both the monetary policy strategy and framework of the Reserve Bank of India would benefit from further evolution in the direction of a precisely defined and overarching objective (price stability), instead of the present multiplicity of goals, and of a well‐defined operating target, enhancing the transparency, communication and signalling effect of policy moves. The authors suggest that embracing a flexible inflation targeting approach is a possible solution.

This is a highly topical issue that has attracted a great deal of attention in policy discussions, both in India and in the region. Very few papers combine the analytical and empirical considerations in this topic.

This chapter examines changes in US monetary policy uncertainty (ΔMPU) and fiscal policy uncertainty (ΔFPU) on stock returns while controlling for downside risk, lagged dividend yield, and time series patterns. Testing G7 markets consistently shows that both ΔMPU and ΔFPU have significant negative impacts on stock returns. Evidence shows that any downside risk, ΔMPU or ΔFPU in US market will soon be transmitted to G6 industrial markets and the impacts are extended to two months. These risk and uncertainty premiums should be priced in the stocks of the major industrial markets.

In this chapter we investigate the response of bond markets to macroeconomic news announcements in the euro area. Specifically, we analyze the impact of (un)expected changes in the interest rate, unemployment rate, consumer confidence index and industrial production index on the returns, volatility and correlations of European government bond markets. Overall, our results suggest that, bond return volatility strongly reacts to news announcements and that the response is asymmetric. However, the influence of macroeconomic news announcements appears insignificant for bond returns. Finally, our results paint a complex picture of the effect of macroeconomic news releases on correlations.

Recent empirical studies by Antonakakis, Chatziantoniou and Filis (2013), Brogaard and Detzel (2015) and Christou et al. (2017) present evidence, which supports the notion that a rise in economic policy uncertainty (EPU) will lead to a decline in stock prices. The purpose of this paper is to examine US categorical policy uncertainty on stock returns while controlling for implied volatility and downside risk. In addition to the domestic impacts of policy uncertainty, this paper also presents evidence that changes in US policy uncertainty promptly propagates to the global stock markets.

This study uses a GED-GARCH (1, 1) model to estimate changes of uncertainties in US monetary, fiscal and trade policies on stock returns for the sample period of January 1990–December 2018. Robustness test is conducted by using different set of data and modeling techniques.

This paper contributes to the literature in several aspects. First, testing of US aggregate data while controlling for downside risk and implied volatility, consistently, shows that responses of stock prices to US policy uncertainty changes, not only display a negative effect in the current period but also have at least a one-month time-lag. The evidence supports the uncertainty premium hypothesis. Second, extending the test to global data reveals that US policy uncertainty changes have a negative impact on markets in Europe, China and Japan. Third, testing the data in sectoral stock markets mainly displays statistically significant results with a negative sign. Fourth, the evidence consistently shows that changes in policy uncertainty present an inverse relation to the stock returns, regardless of whether uncertainty is moving upward or downward.

The current research is limited to the markets in the USA, eurozone, China and Japan. This study can be extended to additional countries, such as emerging markets.

This paper provides a model that uses categorical policy uncertainty approach to explain stock price changes. The parametric estimates provide insightful information in advising investors for making portfolio decision.

The estimated coefficients of changes in monetary policy uncertainty, fiscal policy uncertainty and trade policy uncertainty are informative in assisting policymakers to formulate effective financial policies.

This study extends the existing risk premium model in several directions. First, it separates the financial risk factors from the EPU innovations; second, instead of using EPU, this study investigates the effects from monetary policy, fiscal policy and trade policy uncertainties; third, in additional to an examination of the effects of US categorical policy uncertainties on its own markets, this study also investigates the spillover effects to global major markets; fourth, besides the aggregate stock markets, this study estimates the effects of US policy uncertainty innovations on the sectoral stock returns.