Engelsk

We use survey expectations about future monetary policy to decompose excess returns on fed funds futures and overnight index swaps into a term premium and an expectation error component. We find that excess returns are primarily driven by expectation errors, while term premia are economically small and negative on average. Most expectation errors stem from market participants underestimating how aggressively the Federal Reserve has eased policy during the last three decades. Our findings reveal that market participants are continuously learning about the central bank's reaction function and have been slow to recognize the rising importance attributed to deteriorating financial conditions and falling stock prices. We document similar results in an international sample of six major currency areas.

In Danmarks Nationalbank's lending survey 1st quarter of 2021 several banks report that loan demand both from their existing and new private customers increased from the 4th quarter of 2020 to the 1st quarter of 2021. The banks mention, among other things, increased activity on the housing market as a possible explanation for the increased loan demand.

Half of homeowners in Denmark finance their mortgages via fixed rate loans. Danish fixed rate mortgages are special, as they can be re-financed without the outstanding debt being significantly increased. This makes refinancing attractive when interest rates decrease. Declin-ing interest rates since the financial crisis have implied that many homeowners have refinanced their fixed rate mortgages to lower rates. This has increased the interest rate pass-through and thus supported the transmission of monetary policy rates to homeowners' budgets.

In this paper, I study how mortgage refinancing influences the interest rate pass-through to household budgets via fixed-rate mortgage contracts in Denmark. The paper shows that the long-run interest rate pass-through is significantly below unity in the years after the financial crisis and subsequently converges towards a level close to unity. The result can be used to understand the importance of the asymmetric effects of monetary policy transmission.

​Assistant Governor Karsten Biltoft will be leaving Danmarks Nationalbank to take up the position of CEO of the resolution authority Finansiel Stabilitet on 1 December 2021.

This memo reviews the academic literature on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Only empirical studies are included. Interventions generally reduce COVID-19 spread but the literature is less conclusive for some interventions than others. Intervention timing and local characteristics are determinants of effectiveness.

Using micro-level data, we document a systematic income-related component in household income forecasting errors. We show that this bias can be formalized by a modest deviation from rational expectations, where agents overestimate the persistence of their income process. The bias alters the distribution of marginal propensities to consume which makes government stimulus policies less effective.