The current 5-year review of the FOMC’s Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy provides an opportunity to assess the revisions made in 2020. I review the rationale behind the 2020 revisions and then discuss the new operational objectives: asymmetric average inflation...

We examine how speeches by Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) members, including regional Fed presidents, shape private sector expectations. Speeches that signal rising inflationary pressures prompt both households and professional forecasters to raise their inflation expectations, consistent...

This paper examines the impact of political polarization on public trust in the Fed and its influence on macroeconomic expectations. Using a large-scale survey experiment which we fielded on President Trump’s 2025 inauguration day, we study how households form beliefs about the Fed regarding...

This paper empirically studies the impact of the quality of political institutions on the link between central bank independence and inflation. Making use of data on the evolution of central bank independence over time and controlling for possible nonlinearities, we employ interaction models to...

In the revised monetary policy strategy of the European Central Bank (ECB), "price stability is best maintained by aiming for two per cent inflation over the medium term", with "symmetric commitment" to this target. "Symmetry means that the Governing Council considers negative and positive...

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 explores communication strategies for anchoring households’ medium-term inflation expectations in a high inflation environment. We conducted a survey experiment with a representative sample of 4,000 German households at the height of the recent inflation surge in early 2023, with...

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...

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...