Equity markets are impacted more by the expectations of future monetary policy than the policy rate surprises on the day of announcement of the policy by the Reserve Bank, according to a working Paper titled, Equity Markets and Monetary Policy Surprises under the Reserve Bank of India Working Paper Series. According to a working paper prepared by RBI officials, the regulatory and development measures which are announced along with the monetary policy too impact the stock markets."...equity markets are affected more by the changes in the market's expectations of future monetary policy (path factor) than the policy rate surprise (target factor) which is in agreement with the conventional thinking that equity markets are forward-looking," the paper said. The paper studies the impact of monetary policy announcements on the returns and volatility in the BSE Sensex by decomposing changes in Overnight Indexed Swap (OIS) rates on policy announcement days into target and path factors. The ...