We study the convergence of European bond markets and the anchoring of inflation expectations in euro area countries using high-frequency bond yield data for France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We find that Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has led to substantial convergence in euro area sovereign...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the behaviour of interbank lending in Germany after a monetary policy impulse. Our VAR analysis shows that following a monetary contraction, the banking system as a whole attracts additional funds from foreign banks. Whereas small cooperative and savings...

The paper shows that US monetary policy has been an important determinant of global equity markets. Analysing 50 equity markets worldwide, we find that returns fall on average around 3.8% in response to a 100 basis point tightening of US monetary policy, ranging from a zero response in some to a...

Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly important aspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge new scholarly literature on central bank communication —mostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this...

The paper shows that there is a substantial degree of heterogeneity in forecast accuracy among Fed watchers. Based on a novel database for 268 professional forecasters since 1999, the average forecast error of FOMC decisions varies 5 to 10 basis points between the best and worst-performers...

Monetary policy in the euro area is conducted within a multi-country, multicultural, and multi-lingual context involving multiple central banking traditions. How does this heterogeneity affect the ability of economic agents to understand and to anticipate monetary policy by the ECB? Using a...

Media coverage of monetary policy actions is a central channel of a central bank’s communication with the wider public, and thus an important factor for its credibility and policy effectiveness. This paper analyses the coverage which ECB monetary policy decisions receive in the print media,...

Practical monetary policy concerns and recent theoretical developments have revived interest in the concept of a "natural" equilibrium real interest rate. The natural real interest rate is potentially an important concept for monetary policy makers and some researchers have suggested that the...

A conventional finding of recursive structural VAR (SVAR) analyses is the price puzzle namely the positive relationship between interest rates and inflation. We employ a Markov regime-switching structural VAR (MRS-SVAR) to investigate whether the price puzzle is present at regimes where there is...

The purpose of this paper is to compare new developments on the monetary policy front, or what is known as inflation targeting, with some of Keynes's ideas as propounded in a pamphlet in 1932. A number of the ingredients of the new monetary policy approach can be found in Keynes, especially that...