Standard New Keynesian models deliver puzzling results at the effective lower bound of short-term interest rates: greater price flexibility amplifies the fall in output in response to adverse demand shocks; labour tax cuts are contractionary; the multipliers of wasteful government spending are...

We document that UK government bond yields systematically rise in a two-day window before Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meetings, which we refer to as pre-MPC windows. The effect concentrates on pre-MPC windows that coincide with new issuance of government bonds. Decomposing the effect into an...

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...

As part of its response to the global banking crisis and a sharp downturn in domestic economic prospects, the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) began a programme of large-scale asset purchases (commonly referred to as quantitative easing or QE) in March 2009, with the aim of...

We propose a shadow rate that measures the overall stance of monetary policy when the lower bound is not necessarily binding. Using daily yield curve data we estimate shadow rates for the US, Sweden, the euro area and the UK, and document that they fall (rise) as monetary policy becomes more...

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...