In this paper we quantitatively investigate how central bank communication affects the market yield curve on announcement days. We do this for two central banks who communicate future policy intentions by means of publishing the path of expected future policy rates. We find that unanticipated changes in the published policy rates correspond to yield changes in the same direction. However, policy revisions cannot explain all variation in market rates on announcement days. We further shed some light on which sources of disagreement could explain these differences.

In this study, we leverage various price discovery measurements to investigate whether and how the addition of the Chinese yuan in Special Drawing Right (SDR) affected price discovery in onshore (USD/CNY) and offshore (USD/CNH) markets. The results show that the less regulated offshore exchange rates contribute more to price discovery than the onshore rates do. Including the yuan in SDR does not change the relative price discovery contributions of the onshore and offshore markets, and more importantly, it enhances the overall price efficiency in both markets, due to lower autocorrelations in the error correction term and fewer arbitrage opportunities. In particular, the price spreads between the onshore and offshore markets decrease, implying that arbitrage opportunities have diminished, as market integration has increased, following the inclusion of the yuan in SDR.