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In this paper, we investigate the responsiveness of financial markets to monetary policy expectations in Turkey. According to the efficient markets hypothesis, financial markets respond to anticipated policy actions prior to a policy announcement. As a result, they are expected to respond only to the unanticipated component of the interest rate change following the announcement. By measuring monetary policy expectations through surveys conducted by the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, we find that the bond market behaves in accordance with the efficient markets hypothesis in Turkey in the 2002-2009 period. Our results suggest that the same is not necessarily true for the stock market. We check the robustness of our results to different survey types in the post-2005 period.

This paper provides a dynamic analysis of the responsiveness of asset markets to monetary policy path revisions. In an era of increased transparency and gradualism in policy making, one might expect an increased response to path revisions in asset markets as the policy actions become more predictable over longer horizons. Using federal funds futures contracts to extract near-term path revisions, we find that the responsiveness of Treasury securities to path revisions is significantly asymmetric, increasing during cycles of tightenings and declining during easings. This is consistent with the earlier literature that documents asymmetric effects of monetary policy on output.

Over the course of the recent liquidity crisis, the Federal Reserve made several changes to its primary credit lending facility such as narrowing the spread between the primary credit rate and the target funds rate and increasing the term of the borrowing. In this paper, we use the model developed by Artuç and Demiralp (2008) to provide a structural assessment of the effectiveness of these changes. Our results suggest that these changes were effective in stabilizing the federal funds market.

The transmission mechanism of monetary policy has received extensive treatment in the macroeconomic literature. Most models currently used for macroeconomic analysis exclude money or else model money demand as entirely endogenous. Nevertheless, academic research and many textbooks continue to use the money multiplier concept in discussions of money. We explore the institutional structure of the transmission mechanism beginning with open market operations through to money and loans to document that the mechanism does not work through the standard multiplier model or the bank lending channel. Our analysis, however, does not reflect on the existence of a broader credit channel.

We test the expectations hypothesis by analyzing changes in three month T-Bill rates (TB3) after FOMC meetings. By estimating the revisions in expectations of future overnight rates, we find a one-to-one relationship between changes in TB3 and path revisions.