Naoko Hara

We consider the influence of domestic and U.S. macro-economic news surprises on daily bond yields over the January 1999 to January 2018 period for four advanced negative interest rate policy (NIRP) economies—Germany, Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland. Our results suggest that the influence of macro-economic news surprises is for all four countries under study during the NIRP period nonexistent or noticeably weaker than during the preceding zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) period. Our results are consistent with the suggestion that NIRP is characterized by a lower bound that is no less constraining than the zero-lower bound that characterizes ZIRP.

This study proposes a method to identify factor-augmented vector autoregression models without imposing uncorrelatedness or any timing restrictions among observed and unobserved factors in the vector autoregression system. To this end, we utilize changes in unconditional shock variances following Rigobon (2003). The proposed method can incorporate both observed and unobserved factors in the structural vector autoregression system and allows the contemporaneous matrix to be fully unrestricted. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the impulse response estimator and consider a bootstrap inference method. We also provide two diagnostic tools: a test for the identification condition and a class of overidentifying restrictions tests. A Monte Carlo experiment shows that the asymptotic and bootstrap methods yield a satisfactory coverage rate when the shock of an observed factor is analyzed, although the bootstrap method is more accurate. We apply the proposed method to an empirical example for the effects of U.S. monetary policies on asset prices. A contractionary monetary policy shock induces positive and hump-shaped interest rate responses along the maturity dimension and negative but insignificant stock price responses.

This paper examines changes in the effects of unconventional monetary policies in the United States. To this end, we estimate a Markov-switching VAR model with absorbing regimes to capture possible structural changes. Our results detect regime changes around the beginning of 2011 and the middle of 2013. Before 2011, the U.S. large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) had relatively large impacts on the real economy and prices, but after the middle of 2013, their effects were weaker and less-persistent. In addition, after the middle of 2013, which includes the monetary policy normalization period, the asset purchase (or balance sheet) shocks had slightly weaker effects than during the early stage of the LSAPs but stronger effects than during the late stage of the LSAPs, while interest rate shocks had insignificant effects on the real economy and prices. Finally, our results suggest that the positive responses of durables and capital goods expenditures to interest rate shocks weakened the negative impacts of interest rate hikes after the middle of 2013 including the period of monetary policy normalization. (JEL C32, E21, E52).