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In this paper, we investigate the dynamic response of stock market volatility to changes in monetary policy. Using a vector autoregressive model, our findings reveal a significant and asymmetric response of stock returns and volatility to monetary policy shocks. Although the increase in the volatility risk premium, futures-trading volume, and leverage appear to contribute to a short-term increase in volatility, the longer-term dynamics of volatility are dominated by monetary policy's effect on fundamentals. The estimation results from a bivariate VAR-GARCH model suggest that the Fed does not respond to the stock market at a high frequency, but they also suggest that market participants' uncertainty regarding the monetary stance affects stock market volatility.

Using federal funds futures data, we show the importance of surprise communication as a component of monetary policy for U.S. macro variables, both before and after 2008. While Gürkaynak et al. (2005) stress the importance of monetary policy communication for asset prices, much of the subsequent VAR literature attributes all effects of monetary policy on macro variables to surprise changes in the policy rate. Instead, we distinguish between monetary policy action and "communication shocks" (surprise announcements about future policy moves), both orthogonal to internal Fed information. To do so,we use a decomposition of futures price movements exploiting variation across contract maturities. In a monthly sample from 1994 to 2008, our results indicate that it is mainly communication shocks - as opposed to actual rate-change surprises - that affect production in the ways traditionally associated with monetary policy shocks.We also use Eurodollar futures to cover the zero-lower bound period and find strong effects on inflation for long-horizon communication shocks.

A growing literature has begun to use overnight indexed swap (OIS) rates to measure market expectations of future short-term interest rates. In this paper, I assess the empirical success of OIS rates in predicting the future path of monetary policy. I first compare US OIS rates to federal funds futures (FFFs), which have regularly been used to construct financial market-based measures of interest rate expectations. For the 2002-2016 period, I find that 1 to 11-month OIS rates provide measures of investors' interest rate expectations that are as good as those from comparable-horizon FFFs contracts. More generally, I find that, on average, 1 to 24-month US, UK, Eurozone and Japanese OIS rates accurately measure expectations of future short-term interest rates. To date, many methods used by monetary economists rely on FFFs data to measure monetary policy expectations. This has limited the application of these methods to US data only. Motivated by the results in this paper, researchers can look to OIS rates as a globally-comparable measure of monetary.