David Gauthier

At FOMC announcements, markets are surprised by information that was public months earlier, voiced by the members they attend to least. Attention follows institutional authority rather than informational content: a Chair or Vice Chair speech draws about six times the press coverage of another governor's, yet it is non-Chair tone that predicts interest-rate forecast errors, excess bond returns and the forward-guidance component of policy surprises. The asymmetry attaches to the office, not the person — on promotion, the same speaker gains attention and loses predictive power. Built on two new datasets: 4,177 Federal Reserve Board speeches and testimonies since 1961, scored into a Monetary Stance Signal, and a panel matching every speech since 1992 to the Reuters articles covering it.

PDFAppendix

Identifies members' causal influence on policy decisions from the predetermined voting rotation of regional Fed presidents — a quasi-experimental design built from institutional rules.

A stress-testing model for the euro area built from entity-level balance-sheet data, measuring how financial shocks propagate across the system.

with Yvan Bécard · American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 14(1), 83–103

Collateral shocks — changes in the financial sector's ability to redeploy collateral — are the dominant source of US business cycles. The estimated shock tracks measured lending standards and market sentiment.

AppendixReplication code

with Yvan Bécard · European Economic Review

A single risk-premium shock generates the comovement of euro-area macroeconomic and financial aggregates once banks pass risky loans to nonbanks, and drives both business and financial cycles.

with Dario Bonciani and Derrick Kanngiesser · Review of Economic Dynamics

Bank resilience raises the steady-state growth rate. The optimal capital ratio is 18%, with a welfare gain fourteen times larger than without endogenous growth.

Bank UndergroundReplication code

Macroeconomic Dynamics 29, e42

Identifies bank credit-supply shocks from the composition of firms' debt — only bank shocks move loans and bonds in opposite directions. They account for a third of output fluctuations and predict the corporate bond spread.

PDFAppendixBank Underground