Whatever-it-takes policymaking during the pandemic
研究了22家央行在疫情期间的“不惜一切代价”政策公告，发现相比有明确规模限制的公告，这类公告平均使10年期国债收益率额外下降47个基点，表明政策规模沟通的重要性。
Central banks across the globe introduced large-scale asset purchase programs to address the unprecedented circumstances experienced during the pandemic. Many of these programs were announced as open-ended to shock-and-awe market participants and restore confidence in financial markets. This paper examines whether these whatever-it-takes announcements had larger effects than announcements with explicit limits on scale. We use a narrative approach to categorize announcements made by twenty-two central banks, and event study, propensity-score-matching, and local projection methods to measure the short-term effects of policy announcements on exchange rates and sovereign bond yields. We find that on average a central bank's first whatever-it-takes announcement lowers 10-year bond yields by an additional 47 basis points relative to size-limited announcements, suggesting that communication of potential policy scale matters. Our results for yields hold for both advanced and emerging economies, while exchange rates go in opposing directions, muting their response when we group all countries together.