Central bank transparency has become the topic of a lively public and academic debate on monetary policy. Unfortunately, it has been complicated by the fact that transparency is a qualitative concept that is hard to measure. This Paper proposes a comprehensive index for central bank transparency...

How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect the deliberation of monetary policymakers? We exploit a natural experiment in the Federal Open Market Committee in 1993 together with computational linguistic models (particularly Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to measure the...

I report some personal views and reflections on transparency experiences and transparency challenges following my first year and a half as Deputy Governor at Sveriges Riksbank regarding (1) flexible inflation targeting, (2) the role of transparency in inflation targeting and committee decisions...

I analyse central bank transparency when the central bank's objective function is its private information. Non-transparency exists when the public does not observe the action of the central bank and an unobservable component of the inflation-control error keeps the public from using its...

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...

We present a model in which issuers of asset backed securities choose to release coarse information to enhance the liquidity of their primary market, at the cost of reducing secondary market liquidity or even causing it to freeze. The degree of transparency is inefficiently low if the social...

We examine whether the publication of forecasts concerning the likely future conduct of monetary policy is socially desirable. Introducing a new central bank loss function that accounts for the deviations from announcements, we incorporate forecasts about future inflation and interest rates into...

We introduce a new type of incentive contract for central bankers: inflation forecast contracts, which make central bankers’ remunerations contingent on the precision of their inflation forecasts. We show that such contracts enable central bankers to influence inflation expectations more...

The classical doctrine of the Lender of Last Resort, elaborated by Thornton (1802) and Bagehot (1873), asserts that the Central Bank should lend to ‘illiquid but solvent’ banks under certain conditions. Several authors have argued that this view is now obsolete: when interbank markets are...

Conventional wisdom holds that overlending problems and banking crises in open economies are provoked by investor moral hazard, which is caused in turn by guarantees on deposits. This Paper shows that this is not necessarily the case: guarantees on deposits may even limit the losses banks...