This paper examines the important but not often discussed issue of accounting in central banks. It highlights the distinguishing factors that make the financial statements of central banks unique relative to those produced by other bodies. We begin by explaining why central banks produce...

We explore the role of ‘dollar shortage' shocks and central bank swap lines in a two-country New Keynesian model with financial frictions. Domestic banks issue both domestic and foreign currency debt and lend in domestic currency. Foreign currency-specific funding shocks, which are amplified...

How do private agents interpret central bank actions and communication? To what extent do the effects of monetary shocks depend on the information disclosed by the central bank? This paper investigates the effect of monetary shocks and shocks to the Bank of England's inflation and output...

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...

This paper presents a theory to link improvements in transparency about monetary policy objectives to improvements in transparency about monetary policy actions and then to the conditional volatility of market expectations of policy rates. Crucially, policy announcements act not just as an...

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 develop a model that can explain the evolution of trend inflation in the United States in the three decades before the Great Recession as a function of the reduction in uncertainty about the monetary policy maker's behaviour. The model features ambiguity-averse agents and ambiguity regarding...