This paper examines the interaction between monetary policy and the macroeconomy using a macro-finance term structure model of Joslin, Priebsch, and Singleton (2012), in which macroeconomic risks are not assumed to be spanned by information about the shape of the yield curve. For model estimation, we apply the Kalman filter to a large number of macroeconomic time series data grouped into output, inflation, and market stress categories and extract three common factors. For the factors determining the shape of the yield curve, we use the call rate, the spread between 10-year government bond yield and the call rate, and a combination of the call rate, 2- and 10-year government bond yields as proxies for the level, slope, and curvature factors. We interpret the call rate as a proxy for both the short rate and the instrument of monetary policy. Empirical results show that the macroeconomic factors have a significant impact on the risk premium associated with monetary policy shocks. Furthermore, we find that monetary policy shocks increase the term premium, which in turn affects the factors determining the yield curve, and such effects on the shape of the yield curve feeds back into the macroeconomic factors. Taken together, empirical findings in this paper can be interpreted as evidence supporting the term premium channel (Ferman, 2011) of monetary policy transmission mechanism.
A new approach to measuring economic policy shocks, with an application to conventional and unconventional monetary policy
