This paper provides comprehensive evidence on the impacts of the Reserve Bank of Australia's (RBA) and the U.S. Fed's target interest rate announcement news on the Australian financial markets over the period 1998-2006. The RBA's news had a significant impact on the first moments of market returns/changes in line with a priori expectations, and the conditional volatility in most of the markets was significantly higher following the news. Asymmetric news effect is also observed for the Australian interest rates where markets tended to respond more strongly to unexpected rate rises than rate falls. While the U.S. Fed's news influenced only the USD/AUD exchange rate, the Australian market volatility was significantly lower in all market segments following the Fed's news. JEL classification: E44; G14; G15

This paper provides comprehensive evidence on the spillover effects of the U.S. Fed's and the European Central Bank (ECB)'s target interest rate news on the market returns and return volatilities of twelve stock markets in the Asia-Pacific over the period [1999][2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006]. The news spillover effects on the returns are generally consistent with the literature where a majority of stock markets shows significant negative returns in response to unexpected rate rises. Whilst the results of the speed of adjustment for the Fed's news are mixed across the markets, the ECB news was absorbed slowly, in general. The return volatilities were higher in response to the interest rate news from both sources. In addition, both the Fed and the ECB news elicited tardy or persisting volatility responses. These findings have important implications for all levels of market participants in the Asia Pacific stock markets. JEL classification: E44; G14; G15Keywords: Target interest rate news; Spillover effects; U.S. Fed; ECB Acknowledgement: We would like to thank Stijn Claessens and an anonymous referee for valuable comments and suggestions that greatly enhanced this paper. The remaining errors, if any, are our own.

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