ONE CENTRAL ARGUMENT of James Tobin’s seminal 1969 Journal of Money, Credit and Banking paper was that “financial policies” can play a crucial role in altering what later became known as Tobin’s q, the market value of a firm’s assets relative to their replacement costs. Tobin emphasized that, in particular, monetary policy can change this ratio. This 1969 JMCB paper together with another of his contributions (Tobin 1978) became a key element in the formulation and understanding of the stock market channel of monetary policy transmission. Tobin’s argument in this work was that a tightening of monetary policy, which may result from an increase in inflation, lowers the present value of future earning flows and hence depresses equity markets.
The second part of Tobin’s argument, namely the relationship between monetary policy and equity prices, is still not very well understood. On the one hand, it has proven difficult to properly identify monetary policy, since monetary policy may be endogenous in that central banks might react to developments in stock markets. Considerable progress has recently been made in this respect. Rigobon and Sack (2002, 2003) develop a methodology that exploits the heteroskedasticity present in financial markets to identify monetary policy shocks, while Kuttner (2001) and Bernanke and Kuttner (2003) derive monetary policy shocks through measures of market expectations obtained from federal funds futures contracts. In this paper, we will employ a methodology similar to Bernanke and Kuttner (2003), by identifying monetary policy shocks through market expectations obtained from surveys of market participants.
» Read more: Taking stock: monetary policy transmission to equity markets.(analysis)