Central banks are increasingly reaching out to the general public to motivate and explain their monetary policy actions. One major aim of this outreach is to guide inflation expectations; another is to ensure accountability and create trust. This article surveys a rapidly-growing literature on...

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 communication -- mostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this...

We ask whether recent changes in monetary policy due to the financial crisis will be temporary or permanent. We present evidence from two surveys--one of central bank governors, the other of academic specialists. We find that central banks in crisis countries are more likely to have resorted to...

The adoption of the euro in 1999 by 11 member states of the European Union created a single currency area second in economic size only to the United States. The euro zone's monetary policy is now set by the European Central Bank (ECB) and its Governing Council rather than by individual national...

The rapid growth performance of the Dutch economy in terms of growth in real GDP, employment and per capita income can be traced back to the mid-1980s. This paper suggests that the growth acceleration of the Dutch economy has primarily been the result of a below-average performance during...

Modern tax systems show a mix of direct and indirect taxes. However, it is difficult if not impossible to explain actual tax systems on the ba-sis of optimality conditions. Political and institutional factors are some-times argued to explain the presence of very complex tax structures. Wepropose...

This paper introduces a general, formal treatment of dynamic constraints, i.e., constraints on the state changes that are allowed in a given state space. Such dynamic constraints can be seen as representations of "real world" constraints in a managerial context. The notions of transition,...

Using a newly developed database for 8 transition economies, this paper examines whether reforms and political freedom are important for foreign bank entry. The paper provides strong evidence that foreign bank entry positively responds to reform measures. We also find some evidence for the...