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An event study of Covid-19 central bank quantitative easing in advanced and emerging economies

Amid the COVID-19 outbreak and related expected economic downturn, many developed and emerging market central banks around the world engaged in new long-term asset purchase programs, or so-called quantitative easing (QE) interventions. This paper conducts an event-study analysis of 24 COVID-19 QE announcements made by 21 global central banks on their local 10- year government bond yields. We find that the average developed market QE announcement had a statistically significant -0.14%1-day impact, which is slightly smaller than past interventions during the Great Recession era. In contrast, the average impact of emerging market QE announcements was significantly larger, averaging -0.28%and -0.43% over 1-day and 3-day windows, respectively