Cash-in-the-market pricing and optimal resolution of bank failures

"This paper presents a theory to link improvements in transparency about monetary policy objectives to improvements in transparency about monetary policy actions and then to the conditional volatility of market expectations of policy rates. Crucially, policy announcements act not just as an instrument but also as a beacon that can potentially communicate information to agents about the policymakers' reactions to shocks. When the objectives of policymakers are not made transparent, agents are more likely to interpret any accommodation to price shocks as indicating that policymakers are following their own unobserved suboptimal objectives. Policymakers in these regimes are therefore less inclined to be transparent in their explanations. Conversely when policy objectives are more clearly defined, policymakers become more transparent in their explanations too. Then, the less markets will be surprised by interest rate announcements. I show that happens at a diminishing rate: as transparency is improved further from already high levels, there is less of a reduction in the variance of market surprises. The reason is that agents know that they can rely more on the monetary policy beacon in