Does the general public know what central banks do? Is this kind of knowledge relevant? Using a survey of Dutch households, we investigate these questions for the case of the European Central Bank (ECB). Our findings suggest that knowledge on the ECB’s objectives is far from perfect. Both a...

Central bankers’ conventional wisdom suggests that nominal interest rates should be raised to implement a lower inflation target. In contrast, I show that the standard New Keynesian monetary model predicts that nominal interest rates should be decreased to attain this goal. Real interest...

While consumption habits have been utilised as a means of generating a hump shapedoutput response to monetary policy shocks in sticky-price New Keynesian economies,there is relatively little analysis of the impact of habits (particularly, external habits) onoptimal policy. In this paper we...

In this paper we present an extension of the Taylor model with staggered wages inwhich wage-setting is also influenced by reference norms (i.e. by benchmark wages).We show that reference norms can considerably increase the persistence of inflationand the extent of real wage rigidity but that...

This paper uses forecasts from the European Central Bank’s Survey of Professional Forecasters to investigate the relationship between inflation and inflation expectations in the euro area. We use theoretical structures based on the New Keynesian and Neoclassical Phillips curves to inform our...

This paper analyses price formation in medium- to longer-term maturity segments of euro area and US inflation-linked and nominal bond markets around the releases of important economic indicators. We compare the pre-crisis and crisis periods, controlling for liquidity effects observed in...