Monetary Policy Committees differ in the way the interest rate proposal is prepared and presented in the policy meeting. In this paper we show analytically how different arrangements could affect the voting behaviour of individual MPC members and therefore policy outcomes. We then apply our...

Central bank announcements simultaneously convey information about monetary policy and the central bank's assessment of the economic outlook. This paper disentangles these two components and studies their effect on the economy using a structural vector autoregression. It relies on the...

Central banks regularly communicate about financial stability issues, by publishing Financial Stability Reports (FSRs) and through speeches and interviews. The paper asks how such communications affect financial markets. Building a unique dataset, it provides an empirical assessment of the...

The question how best to communicate monetary policy decisions remains a highly topical issue among central banks. Focusing on the experience of the European Central Bank, this paper studies how explanations of monetary policy decisions at press conferences are perceived by financial markets....

Transparency has become an almost universal virtue among central banks. The paper tests empirically, for the case of the Federal Reserve, two hypotheses about central bank transparency derived from the debate of Morris and Shin (2002) and Svensson (2006). First, the paper finds that the...

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 communicationmostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this...

There is a broad consensus in the literature that costs of information processing and acquisition may generate costly disagreements in expectations among economic agents, and that central banks may play a central role in reducing such dispersion in expectations. This paper analyses empirically...

Fed's monetary policy announcements convey a mix of news about different kinds of conventional and unconventional policies and about the economy. Financial market responses to these announcements are very leptokurtic: often tiny, but sometimes large. I estimate the underlying structural shocks...