For central banks, official communications serve as essential monetary policy instruments: In press releases, speeches, and interviews, central banks explain their decisions, manage expectations, and promote confidence in their strategy. This Weekly Report analyzes European Central Bank (ECB)...

Central bank intervention in the form of quantitative easing (QE) during times of low interest rates is a controversial topic. This paper introduces a novel approach to study the effectiveness of such unconventional measures. Using U.S. data on six key financial and macroeconomic variables...

The 1990s and early 2000s witnessed an unprecedented increase in central bank transparency around the world, yet there has been little empirical work that convincingly demonstrates any economic benefits of increased central bank transparency. This paper shows that, since the late 1980s, U.S,...

We develop and apply a procedure to test the welfare implications of a beauty and non-beauty contest based on survey forecasts of interest rates and yields in a large country sample over an extended period of time. In most countries, interest rate forecasts are unbiased and consistent with both...

Monetary policy shocks affect interest rates at long horizons (10 years or more). Furthermore, the private sector's real GDP forecasts are revised upward in response to a monetary tightening. These facts challenge the prevailing theories in academic and policy circles. In this paper, I propose a...

Communication with the public is an ever-growing practice among central banks and complements their decisions of interest rate setting. In this paper we examine one feature of the communicational practice of the Central Bank of Chile (CBC) which summarizes the assessment of the Board about the...

We combine questions from the Michigan Survey about the future path of prices, interest rates, and unemployment to investigate whether households are aware of the basic features of U.S. monetary policy. Our ndings support the view that at least some groups of households form their expectations...

This paper provides an assessment of the macroeconomic models regularly used for forecasting and policy analysis in the Eurosystem. These include semi-structural, structural and time-series models covering specific jurisdictions and the euro area within a closed economy, small open economy,...

The U.S. Subprime Crisis and the subsequent Great Recession have highlighted a renewed interest in the proper design and implementation of Early Warning Systems (E.W.S.), in order to help deter the onset of subsequent extreme financial events, through the implementation of adequate crisis...

To assess the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee decisions about the Official Bank Rate under forecast uncertainty, I estimate simple forecast-based interest rate rules augmented by the forecast standard deviations recovered directly from the Inflation Report fan charts. I find that...