Central banks' forecasts are important monetary policy inputs and tools for central bank communication. We survey the literature on forecasting at the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of England and Bank of Canada, focusing especially on recent developments. After describing these...

Inflation expectations are a key determinant of actual and future inflation and thus matter for the conduct of monetary policy. We study how firms form their inflation expectations using quarterly firm-level data from the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey, spanning the 2001 to 2015...

Press releases announcing and explaining monetary policy decisions play a critical role in the communication strategy of central banks. Because of their market-moving potential, it is particularly important how they are drafted. Often, central banks start from the previous statement and update...

We construct a 23-country panel data set to consider the effect of central bank projections and forward guidance on private-sector forecast disagreement. We find that central bank projections and forward guidance matter mainly for private-sector forecast disagreement surrounding upcoming policy...

We use narrative evidence along with a novel database of real-time data and forecasts from the Bank of Canada's staff economic projections from 1974 to 2015 to construct a new measure of monetary policy shocks and estimate the effects of monetary policy in Canada. We show that it is crucial to...

We compare the Federal Reserve's asset purchase programs with those implemented by the Bank of England and the Swedish Riksbank, and the Swiss National Bank's reserve expansion program. We decompose government bond yields into (i) an expectations component, (ii) a global term premium and (iii) a...

Many explanations for the decline in real interest rates over the last 30 years point to the role that population aging or rising income inequality plays in increasing the long-run aggregate demand for assets. Notwithstanding the importance of such factors, the starting point of this paper is to...

While two strands of the literature suggest that PPI inflation, in addition to or instead of CPI inflation, should be a targeting variable in a monetary policy rule, the distinction between the two is only important when they do not co-move strongly. Our first contribution is to document that...

How should independent central banks react if pressured by fiscal policymakers? We study an environment with strategic monetary-fiscal interactions where the central bank has a limited degree of commitment to follow policies over time and the fiscal authority has none. We contrast the...

We compare the performance of alternative monetary policy frameworks (inflation targeting, average inflation targeting, price level targeting and nominal GDP level targeting) in a tractable HANK model where incomplete financial markets and idiosyncratic earnings risk introduce precautionary...