The increasing weight of open market transactions in central bank operations and the widening use of purchase agreements underlines a progress towards convergence of monetary policy instruments and procedures in EU countries. This paper presents a survey of features of open market operations...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the use of monetary policy instruments and procedures (MPIP) in EU countries. In particular, it focuses on three important issues which arise in this context. Fist, we examine the structural position of the EU money markets. Second , evidence is...

Existing work on wage bargaining (as exemplified by Cukierman and Lippi, 2001) typicallypredicts more aggressive wage setting under monetary union. This insight has not beenconfirmed by the EMU experience, which has been characterised by wage moderation,thereby eliciting criticism from Posen and...

How do financial markets price new information? This paper analyzes price setting atthe intersection of private and public information, by testing whether and how thereaction of financial markets to public signals depends on the relative importance ofprivate information in agents’ information...

Money demand is probably one of the most extensively studies economic relationships in applied economics. While useful surveys of existing literature are available, much of the attention ahes focused on the United States. However, a considerable number of papers have recently been produced...

We investigate the role of economic transparency within the framework of one of Townsend’s models of ‘forecasting the forecasts of others’. The equilibrium has the property that ‘higher order beliefs’ are coordinated into a finite-dimensional setup that is amenable to address monetary...

This paper demonstrates how the real-time forecasting accuracy of different Brent oil price forecast models changes over time. We find considerable instability in the performance of all models evaluated and argue that relying on average forecasting statistics might hide important information on...

The ECB Working Paper Series seeks to disseminate economic research on issues that are relevant to the various tasks and functions of the ECB. The Series invites submissions of research work by ECB staff and visitors. Papers by researchers not affiliated with the ECB may also be considered for...

Monetary Policy Committees differ in the way the interest rate proposal is preparedand presented in the policy meeting. In this paper we show analytically how differentarrangements could affect the voting behaviour of individual MPC members andtherefore policy outcomes. We then apply our results...

This paper presents the methodological and statistical framework for macro-prudential analysis of the financial condition of the EU banking sector that has been adopted by the European System of Central Banks (ESCB). The framework is also a central component of broader financial stability...