What are the effects of policy reversals which were initiated by the US bureaucracy in response
to the 2008 global financial crisis? Answering this question is challenging because US capital
markets are relatively mature and policy reversals are far and in between in recent years.
Specifically, the challenges include the one-time nature of these US policy reversals, the
confounding effects of many programs targeting interrelated segments of the capital markets at
the same time as well as possible endogeneity issues. China, on the other hand, offers a natural
experiment to study the effects of policy reversals. In the last three decades, the Chinese
government has initiated many policy changes to liberalize the capital markets and some of these
have been reversed several times. Using hand-collected data of policy reversals targeting the
Chinese stock markets from 1994 through 2009, we are able to address the first two challenges.
To resolve any endogeneity issue, we focus on the impact of such policy reversals (targeted at
the Chinese stock markets) on the Chinese repo markets, which trade market-driven interest rates.
We find that the Chinese policy reversals are indeed effective in reducing the term spread, the
volatility of the interest rate, and the volatility of the term spread. Our results suggest that the
policy risk is systematically priced in financial securities, implying that policy makers can rely
on financial market indicators to objectively evaluate their policy decisions.
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