This paper studies monetary policy committee transparency (MPCT) based on a new index that measures central bankers' educational and professional backgrounds as disclosed through central bank websites. Based on a novel cross-sectional data set covering 75 central banks, we investigate the...

The personalities of central bankers moved center stage during the recent financial crisis. Some central bankers even gained "superstar" status. In this paper, we evaluate the pivotal role of superstar central bankers by assessing the difference an outstanding governor makes to economic...

Monetary policy increasingly relies on steering market expectations about future policy. This paper identifies a monetary policy news shock based on a VAR model. A monetary news shock is equivalent to new information about the Fed's future monetary policy becoming available today. One example of...

In this paper we distinguish the responses of conventional and unconventional monetary policy measures on macroeconomic variables, using a high frequency data set which measures the impact of the ECB's monetary policy decisions. For the period 2002:01 to 2019:06 we show that unconventional and...

The present paper studies the consequences of conflicting narratives for the transmission of monetary policy shocks. We focus on conflict between the presidents of the ECB and the Bundesbank, the main protagonists of monetary policy in the euro area, who often disagreed on policy over the past...

This paper analyzes the interest rate setting of the European Central Bank (ECB) both before and after the outbreak of the global financial crisis. In the current monetary policy literature, researchers typically select one Taylor rule-based model in order to analyze the interest rate setting of...

Using a randomized controlled trial in a 2018 survey of a representative sample of the German population, we study whether providing information about the European Central Bank's (ECB) inflation record in comparison to its inflation target affects people's trust in the central bank. In the...

The Fed's Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey (SLOOS) is widely considered a good indicator of banks' lending conditions. We use the change in corporate bond spreads on SLOOS release days to instrument changes in lending standards. A series of estimated IV local projections shows that lending...

How do the business cycle effects of loan supply shocks depend on the state of prudential regulation in the euro area? To address this question, we first identify regulatory cycles from a cumulative prudential policy index that tracks the evolution of the regulatory stance in the euro area....

This paper aims at discovering the decision rule the Governing Council of the ECB uses to set interest rates. We construct a Taylor rule for each member of the council and for the euro area as a whole, and aggregate the interest rates they produce using several classes of decision-making...