This paper studies the effects of verbal interventions by European cen-tral bankers on high-frequency euro-dollar exchange rates. We find that ECB verbal interventions have had only small and short-lived effects. Ver- bal interventions which are reported in news report headlines are more likely...

Although some authors have suggested that monetary expansion is still possible when the monetary policy interest rate cannot be reduced further, central banks tend to avoid interest rates close to the zero lower bound. Taking into account central banks.aversion to very low interest rates, we...

We investigate whether the anchoring properties of long-run inflation expectations in the United States, the euro area and the United Kingdom have changed around the economic crisis that erupted in mid-2007. We document that in these three economies, expectations measures extracted from...

In their seminal paper, Morris and Shin (2002a) argued that increasing the precision of public information is not always bene.cial to social welfare. Svensson (2005) however has disputed this by saying that although feasible, the conditions for which this was true, were not at all that likely....

In contrast to previous empirical attempts to examine the effect of increasing central bank transparency on macroeconomic magnitudes, we investigate how the link between inflation and inflation expectations alters with increasing transparency. Our motivation stems from the belief that changes in...

Recent debates about crime on the one hand and the purported deterioration of values and norms on the other hand implicitly refer to two kinds of coordination mechanisms. Crime is supposed to be a consequence of deficient material incentives in the form of detection and formal sanctions. Values...

This paper surveys the literature on monetary policy at the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. Certain crucial insights regarding expectations have been neglected in recent research in this field. Taking this into account, the interactions between demand and supply shocks appear crucial...

We provide an up-to-date overview of the literature on the desirability of central bank transparency from an economic viewpoint. Since the move towards more transparency, a lot of research on its e¤ects has been carried out. First, we show how the theoretical literature has evolved, by...

Should central banks increase their degree of transparency any further? We show that there is likely to be an optimal intermediate degree of central bank transparency. Up to thisoptimum more transparency is desirable: it improves the quality of private sector inflation forecasts. But beyond the...

The empirical evidence of heavy tails in stock return data is recognised by risk managers as an important factor in assessing the Value-at-Risk and risk profile of investment portfolios. Tail index estimation appears to be a tailor-made tool for estimating the extreme quantiles of heavy tailed...