Market Reaction to Unexpected Monetary Policy Announcement

A bit wonky but interesting:

This paper examines the daily response of euro area stock markets to unexpected ECB monetary policy announcements. We define ECB’s unexpected decisions in analyzing the consensus in the specialized press the days before the announcement. Our preliminary results show that very few ECB’s announcement’s are unexpected by ECB watchers, this is a sign that the ECB’s monetary policy is very predictable. We also find little responses of stock markets to unexpected monetary policy decisions. If Eurozone equity markets react homogeneously to unexpected monetary policy decisions, we can see that reactions are higher in France than in Germany. We find significant and heterogeneous responses from sectorial indexes which indicate that the financial channel of monetary policy is different following the sector. Finally, we find that markets are more sensitive to good news in bad times, but there is no evidence of the opposite.

Posted by on June 17th, 2009 at 1:23 pm


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