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Central bank credibility is critical for the effectiveness of monetary policy. The measures of credibility that are based on the changes in actual inflation rate do not perform very well in environments of chronic inflation. We design an alternative measure that allows us to track the evolution of credibility in an inflationary environment. Credibility is defined as the central bank's ability to lower inflation expectations towards its inflation target via current interest rate decisions. We adopt a Bayesian set up to exploit this definition and document how credibility changes over time. Our measure differs from the existing measures that are based on the deviation of inflation expectations from the inflation target. We show that the latter tests may be too blunt in the EM context and either overlook marginal improvements in credibility or incorrectly attribute the temporary reductions in the inflation rate to improvements in credibility. Utilizing a time varying parameters modeling structure, we show that the credibility of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey (CBRT) has declined significantly over time. Potential reasons for this deterioration could be the CBRT's disappointing performance in hitting the inflation target and its exposure to political pressures. We apply our methodology to Brazil as well to highlight its advantages and draw a comparison to the existing literature.

Negative interest rate policy (NIRP) is associated with a particular friction. The remuneration of banks' retail deposits tends to be floored at zero, which limits the typical transmission of policy rate cuts to bank funding costs. We investigate whether this friction affects banks' reactions under NIRP compared to a standard rate cut in the euro area. We argue that reliance on retail deposit funding and the level of excess liquidity holdings may increase banks' responsiveness to NIRP. We find evidence that banks highly exposed to NIRP tend to grant more loans. This confirms studies pointing to higher risk taking by banks under NIRP and contrasts results that associate NIRP with a contraction in bank loans. Broader coverage of our loan data and the explicit consideration of banks' excess liquidity holdings are likely reasons for this different result compared to some earlier literature. We are the first to document the importance of banks' excess liquidity holdings for the effectiveness of NIRP, pointing to a strong complementarity of NIRP with central bank liquidity injections, e.g. via asset purchases.

In June 2014 the ECB became the first major central bank to lower one of its key policy rates to negative territory. The theoretical and empirical literature is silent on whether banks' reaction would be different when the policy rate is lowered to negative levels compared to a standard reaction to a rate cut. In this paper we examine this question empirically by using individual bank data for the euro area to identify possible adjustments by banks triggered by the introduction of negative interest rates through three channels: government bond holdings, bank lending, and wholesale funding. We find evidence of a significant adjustment of banks' balance sheets during the negative interest rate period. Banks tend to extend more loans, hold more non-domestic government bonds and rely less on wholesale funding. The nature and scope of the adjustment depends on banks' business models.

Many central banks in emerging economies have used reserve requirements (RR) to alleviate the trade-off between financial stability and price stability in recent years. Notwithstanding their widespread use, transmission channels of RR have remained largely as a black-box. In this paper, we use bank-level data to explore the interaction between RR and bank lending behavior. Our empirical findings suggest that short-term borrowing from the central bank is not a close substitute for deposits for banks. Bank lending behavior responds significantly to reserve requirements and liquidity positions. Our analysis allows us to identify a new channel that we name as the "liquidity channel". The channel works through a decline in bank liquidity and loan supply due to an increase in reserve requirements.

We explore the effect of volatility in the federal funds market on the expectations hypothesis in money markets. We find that lower volatility in the bank funding markets market, all else equal, leads to a lower term premium and thus longer-term rates for a given setting of the overnight rate. The results appear to hold for the US as well as the Euro Area and the UK. The results have implications for the design of operational frameworks for the implementation of monetary policy and for the interpretation of the changes in the Libor-OIS spread during the financial crisis.

This paper assesses the effectiveness of monetary policy communication of the Central Bank of Turkey (CBT) by quantifying the information content of the policy statements released right after the monthly Monetary Policy Committee meetings. First, we quantify the signal regarding the next interest rate decision and ask whether CBT's words match its deeds, i.e., whether communication improves predictability using the Autoregressive Conditional Hazard model. Our findings suggest that the role of statements in predicting the next policy move have strengthened following the adoption of full-fledged inflation targeting (IT) regime. Second, we identify the surprise component of policy communication directly from market commentaries and assess its impact on the term structure of interest rates. We find that the response of the yield curve to policy statements have become highly significant for the unanticipated changes in the monetary policy communication and the relative importance of communication in driving market yields has increased through time.

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.

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.