Deliberately or not, by providing its stance on the prospects of the economy, rationalizing past decisions or announcing future actions, central banks influence financial markets' expectations of its future policy. In bad times, monetary policy communication inducing an upward revision of the...

Asset price inflation presents central banks with a puzzle. I examine the case of Germany, 1925-7, when the Reichsbank intervened to bring down stock prices, rectify imbalances and curb speculation. Present value relations, comparisons with historical valuation measures and the time-series...

The dangers of shouting ``fire'' in a crowded theater are well understood, but the dangers of rushing to the exit in the financial markets are more complex. Yet, the two events share several features, and I analyze why people crowd into theaters and trades, why they run, what determines the...

Due to the severity of the financial market crisis most central banks reached the limits of their traditional monetary policy instruments and relied to a very large extent on instruments of unconventional monetary policy. In our paper we develop a simple theoretical framework for the money...

I estimate the dynamic effects of respectively traditional interest rate innovations and unconventional monetary policy actions on the Euro area economy. The results show that the Eurosystem can stimulate the economy beyond the policy rate by increasing the size of its balance sheet. The...

This paper has three parts. Part 1 constructs a classical economic model of inflation, augmented by a complete set of financial markets; I call this the core monetary model. Part 2 develops a series of calibrated examples to illustrate how the core monetary model explains the history of...

This paper compares the effects of conventional monetary policy on real borrowing costs with those of the unconventional measures employed after the target federal funds rate hit the zero lower bound (ZLB). For the ZLB period, we identify two policy surprises: changes in the 2-year Treasury...

This paper explores the impacts on an economy of a central bank changing the size and composition of its balance sheet. One of the ways in which such asset purchases could influence prices and demand is via portfolio balance effects. We develop and calibrate a simple OLG model in which...

We examine the impact of large scale asset purchase announcements of government bonds on real GDP and the CPI in the United Kingdom and the United States with a Bayesian VAR, estimated on monthly data from 2009M3 to 2014M5. We identify an asset purchase announcement shock with four different...

A competitive stock market is embedded into a neoclassical growth economy to analyze the interplay between the acquisition of information about firms, its partial revelation through stock prices, capital allocation and income. The stock market allows investors to share their costly private...