Inflation expectations are a key determinant of actual and future inflation and thus matter for the conduct of monetary policy. We study how firms form their inflation expectations using quarterly firm-level data from the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey, spanning the 2001 to 2015...

We document a large return drift around monetary policy announcements by the Federal Open Market Committee. Stock returns start drifting up 25 days before expansionary monetary policy surprises, whereas they decrease before contractionary surprises. The cumulative return difference across...

Do firms' and consumers' expectations react to central bank announcements? Past literature has come to divergent conclusions, but it has systematically ignored how media treat the announcements. This paper investigates the link between monetary policy announcements and expectations by taking...

This paper studies the causal effect of inflation literacy on inflation expectations and trust in the central bank using a randomized control trial (RCT) on a representative sample of the German population. In an experiment with two steps, we first test the effect of non-numerical information...

There has been a remarkable rise in the transparency of monetary policy during the last two decades. This paper provides an overview of the ways in which central banks have been providing more information about their monetary policymaking. Furthermore, it reviews the theoretical literature on...

Central banks affect the resources available to fiscal authorities through the impact of their policies on the public debt, as well as through their income, their mix of assets, their liabilities, and their own solvency. This paper inspects the ability of the central bank to alleviate the fiscal...

We analyze policy in a two-tiered monetary system. Noncompetitive banks issue deposits while the central bank issues reserves and a retail CBDC. Monies differ with respect to operating costs and liquidity. We map the framework into a baseline business cycle model with “pseudo wedges” and...

Using a randomized controlled trial, we study whether showing German respondents a graph plotting the European Central Bank's inflation target alongside inflation in the euro area from 1999 to 2017 affects respondents' trust in the ECB. The treatment has, on average, no significant effect on the...

The major central banks now operate in a regime of abundance of bank reserves. As a result, they can only raise the money market rate by increasing the rate of remuneration of bank reserves. This, in turn, leads to large transfers of the central banks' profits (and more) to commercial banks that...

We examine "Forward Guidance Contracts", which make central bankers' utility contingent on the precision of interest-rate forecasts for some time. Such Forward Guidance Contracts are a exible commitment device and can improve economic performance when the economy is stuck in a liquidity trap....