Does the general public know what central banks do? Is this kind of knowledge relevant? Using a survey of Dutch households, we investigate these questions for the case of the European Central Bank (ECB). Our findings suggest that knowledge on the ECB's objectives is far from perfect. Both a weak...

Wordscores uses word frequencies to extract information from texts with known policy positions. Wordscores uses this information to estimate the unknown policy positions of so - called virgin texts. We apply Wordscores to the ECB President's introductory statements following Governing Council...

Does the general public know what central banks do? Is this kind of knowledge relevant? Using a survey of Dutch households, we investigate these questions for the case of the European Central Bank (ECB). Our findings suggest that knowledge on the ECB's objectives is far from perfect. Both a weak...

This paper examines whether the clarity of central bank communication about inflation has changed with the economic environment. We use readability statistics and content analysis to study the clarity of communication on the inflation outlook by seven central banks between 1997 and 2010....

We show that the announcement of the ECB’s Strategy Review and the revision of its inflation target in summer 2021 went largely unnoticed by the wider public. Although it is hard to reach out to this group, we find evidence that communicating key elements of the strategy can enhance the...

This paper reports the results of a survey of former members of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank, which sought their views on monetary policy communication practices, the related challenges and the road ahead. Pronounced differences across the respondent groups are rare,...