Evolving United States stock market volatility : the role of conventional and unconventional monetary policies

Abstract

Despite the econometric advances of the last 30 years, the effects of monetary policy stance during the boom and busts of the stock market are not clearly defined. In this paper, we use a structural heterogeneous vector autoregressive (SHVAR) model with identified structural breaks to analyse the impact of both conventional and unconventional monetary policies on U.S. stock market volatility. We find that contractionary monetary policy enhances stock market volatility, but the importance of monetary policy shocks in explaining volatility evolves across different regimes and is relative to supply shocks (and shocks to volatility itself). In comparison to business cycle fluctuations, monetary policy shocks explain a greater fraction of the variance of stock market volatility at shorter horizons, as in medium to longer horizons. Our basic findings of a positive impact of monetary policy on equity market volatility (being relatively stronger during calmer stock market periods) are also corroborated by analyses conducted at the daily frequency based on an augmented heterogeneous autoregressive model of realised volatility (HAR-RV) and a multivariate k-th order nonparametric causality-in-quantiles framework. Our results have important implications both for investors and policymakers.