Recent studies find that short-term fluctuations in EMU have been symmetric. This finding leads to benign views on the functioning of EMU as an optimum currency area (OCA), that are difficult to reconcile with the sovereign debt crisis. We try to solve this puzzle by looking at medium-term...

The purpose of this study is to examine how monetary integration affects the exchange rate pass-through, by testing whether monetary policy convergence in the euro area led to a convergence in terms of exchange rate pass-through. We conduct a comparative study between the “experiment group”...

Using the model by Morris and Shin (2002), we distinguish between how people perceive a state and how they act upon it. We show than even for perceptions, where the coordination motive plays no role, improving the quality of public information does not always reduce the forecasting error. The...

The literature on the behavior of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has focused on static voting patterns. We find statistical support for a dynamic pattern using a panel reaction function to analyze MPC votes over the 1997-2008 period. We find that internal and external...

Wordscores uses word frequencies to extract information from texts with known policy positions. Wordscores uses this information to estimate the unknown policy positions of so - called virgin texts. We apply Wordscores to the ECB President's introductory statements following Governing Council...

Does the general public know what central banks do? Is this kind of knowledge relevant? Using a survey of Dutch households, we investigate these questions for the case of the European Central Bank (ECB). Our findings suggest that knowledge on the ECB's objectives is far from perfect. Both a weak...

We study the impact of forward guidance used as an unconventional monetary policy tool at the zero lower bound of the policy rate on real and breakeven US Treasury yield curves. We find that explicit FOMC policy rate guidance announcements led to a significant reduction in real yields. By...

The interest rate channel of monetary policy works both through short- and long-term interest rates. At the zero lower bound of the policy rate, monetary policy can still be effective through unconventional monetary policy measures. We study whether the sensitivity of Canadian government bond...

This paper examines whether the clarity of central bank communication about inflation has changed with the economic environment. We use readability statistics and content analysis to study the clarity of communication on the inflation outlook by seven central banks between 1997 and 2010....

This paper evaluates the changes in monetary policy frameworks made by 14 central banks in advanced economies over the period 2007-2018. We draw several conclusions about the evolution of their monetary policy strategies. There has been a tendency among central banks to move towards more...