Skewed Interest Rate Expectations and Effects of Central Banks' Market Operations: Empirical Findings Using Granular Transaction Data

Using trade repository data on transaction records of Japanese yen-denominated overnight index swap, we estimate individual market participants' expectations on future interest rates and document their time-variant distribution with its higher order moments. By leveraging this novel information, we implement quantitative exercises to verify the state-dependent effects of the Bank of Japan (BoJ)'s outright purchase of Japanese Government Bonds (JGBs) on the JGB yields conditional on the moments of this expectation distribution. We find that the BoJ's fixed-rate purchase operation resulted in a larger reduction of the JGB yields when the expectation distribution on future interest rates was skewed more positively. This empirical result implies the usefulness of the estimated expectation distribution for central banks to conduct market operations effectively.