Failures of government policies often provoke opposite reactions from citizens; some call for a reversal of the policy while others favor its continuation in stronger form. We offer an explanation of such polarization, based on a natural bimodality of preferences in political and economic...

We propose a signaling model in which the central bank and firms receive information on cost-push shocks independently from each other. If the firms’ signals are rather unlikely to be informative, central banks should remain silent about their own private signals. If, however, firms are...

It is argued in literature that transparency may be detrimental to welfare. Morris and Shin (2002) suggest reducing the precision of public information or withholding it. The latter seems to be unrealistic. Thus, the issue is not whether central bank should disclose or not its information, but...

A speaker attempts to persuade a listener to accept a request by presenting evidence. A persuasion rule specifies what evidence is persuasive. This paper compares static and dynamic rules. We present a single linear program (i) whose solution corresponds to the listener's optimal dynamic rule...

Leaks are pervasive in politics. Hence, many committees that nominally operate under secrecy de facto operate under the threat that information might be passed on to outsiders. We study theoretically and experimentally how this possibility affects the behavior of committee members and the...

Transparency has become one of the main features of monetary policymaking during the last decade. This paper establishes some stylized facts. In addition, it provides a systematic overview of the practice of monetary policy transparency around the world. It shows much diversity in information...

This paper investigates the characteristics of central bank websites across a large sample of central banks. We systematically derive and quantify these characteristics across three dimensions: text, visual presentation, and website performance. We then conduct a survey to isolate the main...

When communicating with the public about the state of the economy, central bankers not only need to decide the messages they want to convey, but also how much to focus on various relevant economic variables. I consider a policymaker whose objective is to minimise the mean-squared error of...