We use daily transactional ledger data from the Bank of England's Archive to test whether and to what extent the Bank of England during the mid-nineteenth century adhered to Walter Bagehot's rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a penalty rate in exchange for...

In this paper we explore both theoretical and empirical evidence on communication with the general public. The model provides guidance for policymakers by highlighting some potentially important risks in communicating simply with a broader audience. In particular, in a model where trust and...

We explore empirically the theoretical prediction that optimism or pessimism have aggregate effects, in the context of monetary policy. First, we quantify the tone conveyed by FOMC policymakers in their statements using computational linguistics. Second, we identify sentiment as the...

Why do long-run interest rates respond to central bank communication? Whereas existing explanations imply a common set of signals drives short and long-run yields, we show that news on economic uncertainty can have increasingly large effects along the yield curve. To evaluate this channel, we...

In this joint Bank of England and Behavioural Insights Team study, we test the effectiveness of different approaches to central bank communications. Using an online experiment with a representative sample of the UK population, we measure how changes to the Bank of England's summaries of the...

It is well known that quantitative credit restrictions, rather than Bagehot-style ‘free lending' constituted the standard response to financial crises in the early days of central banking. But why did central banks in the past frequently restrict the supply of loans during financial crises? In...

We study the macroeconomic consequences of issuing central bank digital currency (CBDC) — a universally accessible and interest-bearing central bank liability, implemented via distributed ledgers, that competes with bank deposits as medium of exchange. In a DSGE model calibrated to match the...

This paper discusses central bank digital currency (CBDC) and its potential impact on the monetary transmission mechanism. We first offer a general definition of CBDC which should make the concept accessible to a wide range of economists and policy practitioners. We then investigate how CBDC...

We ask how central banks can change their communication in order to receive greater newspaper coverage. We write down a model of news production and consumption in which news generation is endogenous because the central bank must draft its communication in such a way that newspapers choose to...

Does the effect of monetary policy depend on the macroeconomic information released by the central bank? Because differences between central bank's and private agents' information sets affect private agents' interpretation of policy decisions, this paper aims to investigate whether the...