We measure the tone (sentiment) of the ECB's Governing Council regarding economic outlook at the time of each monetary policy meeting and use this information together with the Eurosystem/ECB staff macroeconomic projections to directly estimate the Governing Council's loss function. Our results...

We test for bias and efficiency of the ECB inflation forecasts using a confidential dataset of ECB macroeconomic quarterly projections. We investigate whether the properties of the forecasts depend on the level of inflation, by distinguishing whether the inflation observed by the ECB at the time...

We depart from the common reaction function-based approach used to infer central bank preferences. Instead, we extract the tone from the textual information in the central bank communication using both a lexicon-based approach and a language model. We combine the tone with real-time information...

We test for state-dependent bias in the European Central Bank's inflation projections. We show that the ECB tends to underpredict when the observed inflation rate at the time of forecasting is higher than an estimated threshold of 1.8%. The bias is most pronounced at intermediate forecasting...

This paper reviews the recent literature on monetary policy rules. We exposit the monetary policy design problem within a simple baseline theoretical framework. We then consider the implications of adding various real world complications. Among other things, we show that the optimal policy...