I document large and persistent errors in investors’ expectations about the short-term interest rate over the business cycle. The largest errors arise in economic downturns and during Fed easings when investors overestimate future short rates and, thus, underestimate future bond returns. At a one-year horizon, errors about the path of the real rate (as opposed to inflation) account for 80% of short-rate forecast error variance, with more than half of that number attributed to the Fed easing more aggressively than the public expected. Short-rate forecast errors induce ex post predictability of excess returns on Treasury bonds that is not due to time-varying risk premium. Received June 10, 2016; editorial decision February 1, 2018 by Editor Robin Greenwood.

We study risk premium in U.S. Treasury bonds. We decompose Treasury yields into inflation expectations and maturity-specific interest-rate cycles, which we define as variation in yields orthogonal to expected inflation. The short-maturity cycle captures the real short-rate dynamics. Jointly with expected inflation, it comprises the expectations hypothesis (EH) term in the yield curve. Controlling for the EH term, we extract a measure of risk-premium variation from yields. The risk-premium factor forecasts excess bond returns in and out of sample and subsumes the common bond return predictor obtained as a linear combination of forward rates.

We study risk premium in U.S. Treasury bonds. We decompose Treasury yields into inflation expectations and maturity-specific interest-rate cycles, which we define as variation in yields orthogonal to expected inflation. The short-maturity cycle captures the real short-rate dynamics. Jointly with expected inflation, it comprises the expectations hypothesis (EH) term in the yield curve. Controlling for the EH term, we extract a measure of risk-premium variation from yields. The risk-premium factor forecasts excess bond returns in and out of sample and subsumes the common bond return predictor obtained as a linear combination of forward rates.

Using a novel no‐arbitrage model and extensive second‐moment data, we decompose conditional volatility of U.S. Treasury yields into volatilities of short‐rate expectations and term premia. Short‐rate expectations become more volatile than premia before recessions and during asset market distress. Correlation between shocks to premia and shocks to short‐rate expectations is close to zero on average and varies with the monetary policy stance. While Treasuries are nearly unexposed to variance shocks, investors pay a premium for hedging variance risk with derivatives. We illustrate the dynamics of the yield volatility components during and after the financial crisis.

Since the mid-1990s, negative stock returns comove with downgrades to the Fed’s growth expectations and predict policy accommodations. Textual analysis of FOMC documents reveals that policy makers pay attention to the stock market. The primary mechanism is their concern with the consumption wealth effect, with a secondary role for the market predicting the economy. We find little evidence of the Fed overreacting to the market in an ex post sense (reacting beyond the market’s effect on growth expectations). Although policy makers are aware that the Fed put could induce risk-taking, moral hazard considerations appear not to significantly affect their decision-making ex ante.

We propose an approach to identify economic shocks (monetary, growth, and risk premium news) from stock returns and Treasury yield changes, which allows us to study the drivers of asset prices at a daily frequency since the early 1980s. We apply the identification to examine investors’ responses to news from the Fed and key macro announcements. We uncover two risk premium shocks—time-varying compensation for discount rate and cash flow news—which have distinct effects on stocks and bonds. Since the mid-1990s, the Fed-induced reductions in both risk premium sources have generated high average stock returns but an ambiguous response in bonds on FOMC days.

We document that since 1994, the equity premium is earned entirely in weeks 0, 2, 4, and 6 in Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) cycle time, that is, even weeks starting from the last FOMC meeting. We causally tie this fact to the Fed by studying intermeeting target changes, Fed funds futures, and internal Board of Governors meetings. The Fed has affected the stock market via unexpectedly accommodating policy, leading to large reductions in the equity premium. Evidence suggests systematic informal communication of Fed officials with the media and financial sector as a channel through which news about monetary policy has reached the market.