Monetary policy | EPFL Graph Search

Monetary policy is the policy adopted by the monetary authority of a nation to affect monetary and other financial conditions to accomplish broader objectives like high employment and price stability (normally interpreted as a low and stable rate of inflation). Further purposes of a monetary policy may be to contribute to economic stability or to maintain predictable exchange rates with other currencies. Today most central banks in developed countries conduct their monetary policy within an inflation targeting framework, whereas the monetary policies of most developing countries' central banks target some kind of a fixed exchange rate system. A third monetary policy strategy, targeting the money supply, was widely followed during the 1980s, but has diminished in popularity since that, though it is still the official strategy in a number of emerging economies. The tools of monetary policy varies from central bank to central bank, depending on the country's stage of

Asset Pricing and Monetary Policy

Nicolas Gauderon

Classical theory asserts that the formation of prices is the result of aggregated decisions ofeconomics agent such as households or corporation. However central banks are very importantagents that have often been neglected in asset pricing models. Central banks decisions ormonetary policy indeed appears to be a first order determinant of prices.This thesis aims to develop an asset pricing model that explicitly incorporates a central bankand to analyze the determination of monetary policy and its impact on financial markets. Myresults should help to improve our understanding of asset prices in the context of a monetaryeconomy. Therefore results should help both to improve portfolio management in presenceof an active monetary policy and to give central bankers a better understanding of their ownmarket impact thus helping them to design better monetary policy.

EPFL2022

Three Essays in Banking and Finance

Damien Olivier Klossner

This thesis develops three models that study the motivation of various agents to take on debt, and the impact that excessive financial leverage can have on social welfare. In the chapter "Short-term Bank Leverage and the Value of Liquid Reserves", the incentive of a bank to take on leverage stems from the fact that its short-term debt provides liquidity benefits to depositors, at the cost of exposing the bank to the risk of runs. In the model, a bank possesses two instruments to manage the risk of runs: its funding policy and the size of its liquid asset holdings, modeled as government bonds. Issuing more debt allows the bank to better capture the liquidity benefits fits priced into deposits but increases illiquidity risk. Holding more bonds makes the bank more robust to withdrawals but it reduces the bank's asset returns. When the supply is scarce, banks are the natural buyers of government bonds. This links the liquidity premium priced into government bonds to the risk of bank runs. In the chapter "Liquidity, Debt Overhang, and Monetary Policy", firms take on bank credit to relax their liquidity constraint and purchase new capital. But taking on debt creates a debt overhang distortion which causes entrepreneurs to pass on protable projects. In the model, entrepreneurs arrange for their financing before they observe the profitability of their investment opportunity. After the latter becomes known, entrepreneurs are liquidity-constrained when investment conditions are favorable, and over-indebted when they are unfavorable. The monetary authority can generate welfare gains by lowering the cost of holding liquidity and, when debt is contracted in nominal terms, by pursuing a counter-cyclical monetary policy. In the chapter "Safe Claim Production and Capital Structure", firms issue debt to satisfy the demand of risk-averse investors for safe claims, at the cost of increasing default risk. In general equilibrium, firms need to be compensated for this service, which can only occur if their debt and equity claims are held and priced by different investor types. This segmentation of the investor base can be sufficient to prevent the existence of a symmetric equilibrium. Instead, only a fraction of firms opt for levered capital structures, and the gain in value obtained by tranching cash flows into debt and equity is offset by the expected cost of default. Changes in aggregate leverage can be divided into variations in extensive (the fraction of levered firms ) and intensive (the leverage ratio of levered firms ) margins. Changes in rm business risk have opposite effects on leverage, depending on whether the risk is of a systematic nature or firm-specific nature.

EPFL2019

Essays in Monetary Policy and Asset Pricing

Benoit Vincent Sylvain Cornet

This thesis uses machine learning techniques and text data to investigate the relationships that arise between the Fed and financial markets, and their consequences for asset prices.The first chapter, entitled Market Expectations and the Impact of Unconventional Monetary Policy: An Application to Twitter Data, is an answer to (Greenlaw et al., 2018), who show, by looking at a large set of monetary policy announcements made between November 2008 and December 2017 - FOMC meetings, release of minutes and speeches of the Fed Chair - that long term yields tended to increase following these events. By doing so, the authors challenge common wisdom according to which the central bank intervention in the aftermath of the financial crisis lowered long term rates (Gagnon, 2016). Using machine learning and twitter data, this chapter develops a novel measure of market expectations of monetary policy, and shows that the increase in yields was simply due to a marginal adjustment of market expectations following announcements being less dovish than expected.The second chapter, entitled Informational Feedback Loop, Monetary Policy Decisions and Asset Prices Dynamics, investigates the consequences of a Fed that uses (1) its own private signal and (2) fed funds futures to take its monetary policy decision. Fed funds futures aggre- gate private information received by financial markets participants - traders - but they also depend on traders' expectations about the Fed's behavior, which makes futures endogenous in the central bank decision. The theoretical model shows that the surprise generated by monetary policy announcements and the subsequent adjustment in short term U.S. treasury yields depend on the precision of the signals received by each agent. When the signal received by traders is more precise than the central bank's, the latter relies more on fed funds futures to take its decision, and the surprise and adjustment of short term yields are smaller. By contrast, long term yields adjust only because the announcement provides traders with new information about the state of the economy, by revealing the central bank's private signal. Finally, when the Fed is averse to financial markets volatility, it tends to put some weight on fed funds futures even if they are not informative about the state of the economy. The empirical part of the paper provides some evidence supporting these channels, by using a topic and tone approach (Hansen and McMahon, 2016) to extract the precision of the signals received by the central bank and traders from FOMC minutes and tweets respectively.

EPFL2022

Three Essays in Banking and Finance

Damien Olivier Klossner

EPFL2019

Essays in Monetary Policy and Asset Pricing

Benoit Vincent Sylvain Cornet

EPFL2022