On 1 June 2018 the ECB celebrated its 20th anniversary. This paper provides a comprehensive view of the ECB's monetary policy over these two decades. The first section provides a chronological account of the macroeconomic and monetary policy developments in the euro area since the adoption of...

Inflation volatility is clearly important for structural analysis, forecasting and policy purposes, yet it is often overlooked in the literature. This paper compares inflation volatility among advanced open economies with inflation targeting monetary policy frameworks. The results of the...

We explain the role of the Phillips Curve in the analysis of the economic outlook and the formulation of monetary policy at the ECB. First, revisiting the structural Phillips Curve, we highlight the challenges in recovering structural parameters from reduced-form estimates and relate the...

The paper assesses the communication strategies of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank and their effectiveness. We find that the effectiveness of communication is not independent from the decisionmaking process in the committee. The paper shows that the Federal...

The paper shows that central bank communication is a key determinant of the market’s ability to anticipate monetary policy decisions and the future path of interest rates. Comparing communication policies by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the ECB since 1999, we find that...

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....

In the New-Keynesian model, optimal interest rate policy under uncertainty is formulated without reference to monetary aggregates as long as certain standard assumptions on the distributions of unobservables are satisfied. The model has been criticized for failing to explain common trends in...

The recent financial crisis deeply affected the money market yield curve and thus, potentially, the proper functioning of the interest rate channel of monetary policy transmission. Therefore, we analyze the effectiveness of monetary policy in steering euro area money market rates using two...

We study the determinants of trust in the ECB as measured by the European Commission's Eurobarometer survey. The formulation of the corresponding question in this survey is very general, and compatible with very different notions of "trust" by respondents. In particular, the survey does not ask...

We assess the yield impact of asset purchases within the ECB’s Securities Markets Programme in five euro area sovereign bond markets during 2010-11. Identification is non-trivial and based on time series panel data regression on predetermined purchases and control covariates. In addition to...