Central bank communication with non-experts : insights from a randomized field experiment

We conducted a randomized field experiment to investigate the impact of direct central bank communication on the monetary policy knowledge and expectations of non-experts. Between 2022 and 2025, at the ECB Visitor Centre, we exposed nearly 5,000 participants from diverse visitor groups to policy briefings, similar to the communication at ECB press conferences. The random assignment of participants to treatment, placebo, or control groups created exogenous variation in the information they received. We implemented a new survey to gain insights into participants' monetary policy knowledge, as well as their inflation and growth expectations, both before and after the information treatment. This approach enabled us to explore how knowledge and trust influence the economic expectations of non-experts. Our findings indicate that treated individuals improved their monetary policy knowledge and developed a better understanding of the ECB's inflation target, which proved to be a key factor in explaining why a substantial share of treated non-experts revised their medium-term inflation expectations, aligning them with the inflation target. However, the improved understanding of monetary policy did not lead to systematic revisions in their economic growth expectations. Removing potential language barriers amplified the effects of direct communication on monetary policy knowledge and individual inflation expectations, confirming the importance of addressing citizens in their native language.