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....

We employ two-stage empirical strategy to analyze the impact of macroeconomic news and central bank communication on the exchange rates of three Central and Eastern European (CEE) currencies against the euro. First we estimate the nominal equilibrium exchange rate based on a monetary model....

This paper studies the reaction of the mean and volatility of the euro-dollar exchange rate to statements of ECB officials during the first years of EMU. We focus on statements on monetary policy and the (potential) strength of the euro. We find that the Bundesbank has dominated the news...

In currency exchange markets, there is a conflict between individual decisions and the socially optimal solution. Whereas agents have a coordination motive to take the same position, at the social level effective market coordination per se is not socially valuable, and the central bank aims at...

Using the variation in national television news of four major member states in the Eurozone, we find causal effects of coverage of high-frequency identified monetary policy announcements on households' inflation expectations in an event study and a generalized Difference-in-Differences approach...

In games with strategic complementarities, public information about the state of the world has a larger impact on equilibrium actions than private information of the same precision, because the former is more informative about the likely behavior of others. This may lead to welfare-reducing...

This paper performs a welfare analysis of economies with private information when public information is endogenously generated and agents can condition on noisy public statistics in the rational expectations tradition. We find that equilibrium is not (restricted) efficient even when feasible...

This paper reports the results of a survey among private sector economists about credibility and transparency of central banks. In line with the survey of Alan Blinder among central bankers, we asked participants in Ifo s World Economic Survey to answer questions on the importance and...

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...

Transparency has become a prominent feature of monetary policy. This paper provides an overview of central bank communication practices and is the first to systematically analyze transparency trends throughout the world and across monetary policy frameworks. It shows that increases in...