About

Anna Cieslak is an Associate Professor of Finance at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Her work focuses on the intersection of asset pricing, macroeconomics, and monetary economics, with particular attention to the dynamics of interest rates and the interactions between central banks and financial markets. She has recently concentrated on central bank communication, especially understanding the channels through which the Federal Reserve influences financial markets. Anna is a frequent seminar speaker at central banks and policy institutions, and her research has been published in top finance journals and featured in leading popular media outlets. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Additionally, she serves as an Associate Editor at the Journal of Finance and the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, and has previously held editorial roles at the Review of Financial Studies, the Review of Finance, and the Journal of Financial Econometrics.

Research topics

• Economics
• Monetary economics
• Financial economics
• Econometrics
• Macroeconomics
• Finance
• Microeconomics

Selected publications

• Risk Management in Monetary Policy: A Review with Asset Pricing Implications

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Inflation and Treasury Convenience

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Inflation and Treasury Convenience

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-08-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We document that U.S. Treasury convenience moved positively with inflation during the inflationary second half of the 20th century but not before WWII or after 2000.A macro-asset pricing model explains this shift through two channels.Inflationary supply shocks raise the opportunity cost of holding money and money-like assets, endogenously increasing convenience yields.In contrast, exogenous liquidity demand shocks elevate convenience but depress consumption and inflation.Model estimates show that spikes in liquidity demand after 2000 account for the weaker convenience-inflation link and the emergence of negative bond-stock betas, distinguishing liquidity from non-liquidity demand shocks.

  PublisherDOI

• Inflation and Treasury Convenience

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Did I Make Myself Clear? The Fed and the Market in the Post-2020 Framework Period

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Tough Talk: The Fed and the Risk Premium

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Inflation and Asset Returns

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-03-01 · 12 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The past half-century has seen major shifts in inflation expectations, how inflation comoves with the business cycle, and how stocks comove with Treasury bonds.Against this backdrop, we review the economic channels and empirical evidence on how inflation is priced in financial markets.Not all inflation episodes are created equal.Using in a New Keynesian model, we show how "good" inflation can be linked to demand shocks and "bad" inflation to supply shocks driving the economy.We then discuss asset pricing implications of "good" and "bad" inflation.We conclude by providing an outlook for inflation risk premia in the world of newly rising inflation.

  PublisherDOI

• Policymakers' Uncertainty

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-11-01 · 13 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Uncertainty is a ubiquitous concern emphasized by policymakers.We study how uncertainty affects decision-making by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).We distinguish between the notion of Fed-managed uncertainty vis-a-vis uncertainty that emanates from within the economy and which the Fed takes as given.A simple theoretical framework illustrates how Fed-managed uncertainty introduces a wedge between the standard Taylor-type policy rule and the optimal decision.Using private Fed deliberations, we quantify the types of uncertainty the FOMC perceives and their effects on its policy stance.The FOMC's expressed inflation uncertainty strongly predicts a more hawkish policy stance that is not explained either by the Fed's macroeconomic forecasts or by public uncertainty proxies.We rationalize these results with a model of inflation tail risks and argue that the effect of uncertainty on the FOMC's decisions reflects policymakers' concern with maintaining credibility for the inflation anchor.

  PublisherDOI

• Policymakers' Uncertainty

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Inflation and Treasury Convenience

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Andreas Schrimpf

  Centre for Economic Policy Research

  43 shared

• Carolin Pflueger

  27 shared

• Pavol Povala

  18 shared

• Annette Vissing‐Jørgensen

  Federal Reserve Board of Governors

  17 shared

• Semyon Malamud

  Swiss Finance Institute

  12 shared

• Michael McMahon

  University of Oxford

  7 shared

• Adair Morse

  7 shared

• Hao Pang

  Wuhan Institute of Technology

  6 shared