This paper reports the results of a survey among private sector economists about credibility and transparency of central banks. In line with the survey of Alan Blinder among central bankers, we asked participants in Ifo s World Economic Survey to answer questions on the importance and...

The purpose of central bank minutes is to give an account of monetary policy meeting discussions to outside observers, thereby enabling them to draw informed conclusions about future policy. However, minutes are by necessity a shortened and edited representation of a broader discussion....

How willing are individual primary dealers to alter their offered yields in central bank quantitative easing auctions of government bonds in order to sell an additional share of the outstanding amount of a bond to the central bank? This question is of great importance for a central bank's...

Through large-scale asset purchases, widely known as quantitative easing (QE), central banks around the world have affected the supply of safe assets by buying quasi-safe bonds in exchange for truly safe reserves. We examine the pricing effects of the European Central Bank's bond purchases in...

Most theoretical central bank models use short horizons and focus on a single tradeoff. However, in reality central banks play complex, long horizon games and face more than one tradeoff. We account for these issues in a simple infinite horizon game with a novel tradeoff: higher rates deter...

When generating conditional forecasts in dynamic models it is common to impose the conditions as restrictions on future structural shocks. However, these conditional forecasts often ignore that there may be uncertainty about the future development of the restricted variables. Our paper therefore...