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AbstractHow do short‐ and long‐term interest rates respond to a jump in financial uncertainty? We address this question by conducting a local projections analysis with US monthly data, period: 1962–2018. The state‐of‐the‐art financial uncertainty measure proposed by Ludvigson, Ma and Ng (2019) is found to predict movements in interest rates at different maturities. In particular, an increase in financial uncertainty is found to trigger a negative and significant response of both short‐ and long‐term interest rates. The response of the short end of the yield curve (i.e., of short‐term interest rates) is found to be stronger than that of the long end (i.e., of long‐term ones). In other words, a financial uncertainty shock causes a temporary steepening of the yield curve. This result is consistent, among other interpretations, with medium‐term expectations of a recovery in real activity after a financial uncertainty shock.

Conventional wisdom suggests that central banks implement monetary policy in a gradual fashion. Some researchers claim that this gradualism is due to 'optimal cautiousness'; in contrast, Rudebusch (Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 49 (2002), pp. 1161–1187) states that the observed policy rate sluggishness is mainly due to serially correlated exogenous shocks. In this paper we use models in first differences to assess the 'endogenous' versus 'exogenous' gradualism hypothesis for the Euro area. Our results suggest that the joint formalization of the two hypotheses is likely to offer the best simple approximation of the Euro area monetary policy conduct.

Successful descriptions of short-term nominal interest rates inertial behavior have frequently been obtained with small scale macro models in which a Central Banker minimizes a loss function embedding an argument labelled as interest rate smoothing. The rationale for this argument is not straightforward. Indeed, there has been a lively debate about it in the literature. In this paper we perform an empirical exercise to evaluate the relationship existing between private sector's rational expectations and interest rate gradualism. Our findings strongly support rational expectations as an element capable to remarkably reduce the importance of the interest rate smoothing weight in replicating the observed path of the federal funds rate. However, we find a predominance of adaptive expectations in shaping the paths of inflation ad output gap. Our results also suggest that the Fed has followed a 'Strict Inflation Targeting' strategy under Greenspan's regime.