In a survey of more than 600 economists, most respondents prefer their central bank to have an explicit inflation target. Roughly half want the central bank to keep its current target. Two thirds of the rest want to raise the target, with a median preferred change of one percentage point. In a...

I study the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on business confidence in 11 Euro area countries and its consequent impact on economic activity. To obtain causal effects, I instrument business confidence with domestic household confidence as well as average household confidence in neighboring...