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This paper documents that ECB announcements on monetary policy increase stock market volatility in the euro area (EA) using several volatility measures from January 1999 to December 2019. Employing event study methods, a more pronounced impact exists following the global financial crisis starting in 2007. All assets react similarly so that no national peculiarities arise. The effects also spill over to 12 non-EA markets analyzed. Stock markets are more sensitive to negative monetary policy news than to positive ones. Further weighting the announcements by financial market reactions, stock markets behave in a more heterogeneous way.
This paper examines the recession probabilities for the Eurozone along four different dimensions: First, we identify the best performing indicators for a recession within the next 12 months based on 43 underlying single variables and their different transformations in a benchmark model. We find that a modified version of the yield curve incorporating the shadow interest rate removes the downward rigidity of the front-leg and restores part of the informational content of the term spread at the zero lower bound. However, the best performing single indicator of the benchmark model is Real M1 followed by the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), the investment grade corporate bond spread and the Terms of Trade. Second, the paper establishes three submodels to increase the lead-time and the stability of recession models: (i) Monetary transmission channels via principal component analysis; (ii) Bivariate regressions to identify paramount combinations; (iii) Unstable surges vis-à-vis the Hodrick-Prescott trend to detect animal spirits and hawkish mistakes. Third, the analysis is extended over various forecasting horizons (6m, 18m and 24m). Fourth, the results are analyzed from the perspective of risk-affine and risk-averse investors.
This paper employs event study methods to evaluate the effects of ECB’s nonstandard monetary policy program announcements on 10-year government bond yields of euro area member states. It covers data from 11 euro area countries from January 1, 2007 to August 31, 2017 and distinguishes between the more solvent countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands) and the less solvent ones (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain). The paper makes three contributions to the literature. First, it is the first paper to reveal that measurable effects of announcements arise with a one-day delay meaning that government bond markets take some time to react to ECB announcements. Second, it quantifies the country-specific extent of yield reduction which seems inversely related to the solvency rating of the corresponding countries. The reduction of the spread between both groups in response to an event is due to a stronger decrease in the less solvent group. Third, this result is confirmed by letting the announcement variable interact with the spread level, which is an innovation in this strand of literature. By employing different data as control variables, it turns out that the results are robust for a given event set.