We study the characteristics of inflation targeting as a shock absorber, using quarterly data for a large panel of countries. To overcome an endogeneity problem between monetary regimes and the likelihood of crises, we propose to study large natural disasters. We find that inflation targeting...

In a highly interlinked global economy a key question for policy makers is how foreign shocks and policies transmit to the domestic economy. We develop a semi-structural multi-country model with rich real and financial channels of international shock propagation for the euro area, the US, Japan,...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

Containing short-term volatility of the overnight interest rate is normally considered the main objective of central bank standing facilities. This paper develops a simple stochastic model to show how the width of the central bank standing facilities corridor affects banks' day-to-day liquidity...

The banking system is modeled in a closed system of financial accounts, whereby the equilibrium volume of bank intermediation between households and corporates reflects structural parameters such as household preferences, comparative cost structures of heterogeneous banks, loan demand of...