Abstract
We examine whether unscheduled communication of members of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) Governing Council affects financial market comovements. To assess comovements, we employ well-defined measures of stock market and government bond yield coexceedances, i.e., the measures of whether markets jointly decrease or increase and by how much. We use the daily data from 2008 to 2014 for the four largest euro area countries, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, in a quantile regression framework and control for persistence in coexceedances and a comprehensive set of relevant factors capturing returns and volatility in various segments of financial markets. We find that central bank communication often contributes to greater coexceedances but only when there are extreme events in the financial markets. The results also suggest that markets perceive the ECB’s communication as a euro area-wide shock, but propagation of this shock depends on the financial (in)stability of individual euro area countries.
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Notes
We understand unscheduled communication to be any verbal or written statement by a member of a policy-making body (the Governing Council in the case of the ECB, i.e., the executive board of the ECB and national central bank governors) that occurs outside of any scheduled release of a central bank.
In our sample, a secondary market purchase program is actively helping to restore confidence in the segment of Italian and Spanish bond market and 3-year long-term refinancing operations are more broadly helping to improve liquidity conditions in the stressed markets of the euro area.
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Acknowledgements
We thank two anonymous referees, Ansgar Belke, Michal Hlavacek, Stefan Lyocsa and Jakub Seidler for their helpful comments. The views in this paper do not represent the views of the National Bank of Slovakia. Horvath appreciate the support of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, no. 19-15650S. Online Appendix is available at http://ies.fsv.cuni.cz/en/staff/horvath.
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Gertler, P., Horváth, R. & Jonášová, J. Central Bank Communication and Financial Market Comovements in the Euro Area. Open Econ Rev 31, 257–272 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11079-019-09561-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11079-019-09561-7