Monetary Policy

Reinforcement Learning for Monetary Policy Under Macroeconomic Uncertainty: Analyzing Tabular and Function Approximation Methods ArXiv ID: 2512.17929 “View on arXiv” Authors: Tony Wang, Kyle Feinstein, Sheryl Chen Abstract We study how a central bank should dynamically set short-term nominal interest rates to stabilize inflation and unemployment when macroeconomic relationships are uncertain and time-varying. We model monetary policy as a sequential decision-making problem where the central bank observes macroeconomic conditions quarterly and chooses interest rate adjustments. Using publicly accessible historical Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), we construct a linear-Gaussian transition model and implement a discrete-action Markov Decision Process with a quadratic loss reward function. We chose to compare nine different reinforcement learning style approaches against Taylor Rule and naive baselines, including tabular Q-learning variants, SARSA, Actor-Critic, Deep Q-Networks, Bayesian Q-learning with uncertainty quantification, and POMDP formulations with partial observability. Notably, despite its simplicity, standard tabular Q-learning achieved the best performance (-615.13 +- 309.58 mean return), outperforming both enhanced RL methods and traditional policy rules. Our results suggest that while sophisticated RL techniques show promise for monetary policy applications, simpler approaches may be more robust in this domain, highlighting important challenges in applying modern RL to macroeconomic policy. ...

Words That Unite The World: A Unified Framework for Deciphering Central Bank Communications Globally ArXiv ID: 2505.17048 “View on arXiv” Authors: Agam Shah, Siddhant Sukhani, Huzaifa Pardawala, Saketh Budideti, Riya Bhadani, Rudra Gopal, Siddhartha Somani, Rutwik Routu, Michael Galarnyk, Soungmin Lee, Arnav Hiray, Akshar Ravichandran, Eric Kim, Pranav Aluru, Joshua Zhang, Sebastian Jaskowski, Veer Guda, Meghaj Tarte, Liqin Ye, Spencer Gosden, Rachel Yuh, Sloka Chava, Sahasra Chava, Dylan Patrick Kelly, Aiden Chiang, Harsit Mittal, Sudheer Chava ...

Sentiment Analysis of State Bank of Pakistan’s Monetary Policy Documents and its Impact on Stock Market ArXiv ID: 2408.03328 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This research examines whether sentiments conveyed in the State Bank of Pakistan’s (SBP) communications impact financial market expectations and can act as a monetary policy tool. To achieve our goal, we first use sentiment analysis techniques to quantify the tone of SBP monetary policy documents and second, we use short time window, high frequency methodology to approximate the impact of tone on stock market returns. Our results show that positive (negative) change in the tone positively (negatively) impacts stock returns in Karachi Stock Exchange. Further extension shows that the communication of SBP still has a statistically significant impact on stock returns when controlling for different variables and monetary policy tool. Also, the communication of SBP does not have a long term constant effect on stock market. ...

Linkages among the Foreign Exchange, Stock, and Bond Markets in Japan and the United States ArXiv ID: 2310.16841 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract While economic theory explains the linkages among the financial markets of different countries, empirical studies mainly verify the linkages through Granger causality, without considering latent variables or instantaneous effects. Their findings are inconsistent regarding the existence of causal linkages among financial markets, which might be attributed to differences in the focused markets, data periods, and methods applied. Our study adopts causal discovery methods including VAR-LiNGAM and LPCMCI with domain knowledge to explore the linkages among financial markets in Japan and the United States (US) for the post Covid-19 pandemic period under divergent monetary policy directions. The VAR-LiNGAM results reveal that the previous day’s US market influences the following day’s Japanese market for both stocks and bonds, and the bond markets of the previous day impact the following day’s foreign exchange (FX) market directly and the following day’s Japanese stock market indirectly. The LPCMCI results indicate the existence of potential latent confounders. Our results demonstrate that VAR-LiNGAM uniquely identifies the directed acyclic graph (DAG), and thus provides informative insight into the causal relationship when the assumptions are considered valid. Our study contributes to a better understanding of the linkages among financial markets in the analyzed data period by supporting the existence of linkages between Japan and the US for the same financial markets and among FX, stock, and bond markets, thus highlighting the importance of leveraging causal discovery methods in the financial domain. ...

Trillion Dollar Words: A New Financial Dataset, Task & Market Analysis ArXiv ID: 2305.07972 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Monetary policy pronouncements by Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) are a major driver of financial market returns. We construct the largest tokenized and annotated dataset of FOMC speeches, meeting minutes, and press conference transcripts in order to understand how monetary policy influences financial markets. In this study, we develop a novel task of hawkish-dovish classification and benchmark various pre-trained language models on the proposed dataset. Using the best-performing model (RoBERTa-large), we construct a measure of monetary policy stance for the FOMC document release days. To evaluate the constructed measure, we study its impact on the treasury market, stock market, and macroeconomic indicators. Our dataset, models, and code are publicly available on Huggingface and GitHub under CC BY-NC 4.0 license. ...