This paper takes up the issue of the flexibility of inflation targeting regimes, with the specific goal of determining whether the monetary policy of the Bank of England, which has a formal inflation target, has been any less flexible than that of the Federal Reserve, which does not have such a...

Recent research has found that macroeconomic survey forecasts of uncertainty exhibit several deficiencies, such as horizon-dependent biases and lower accuracy than simple unconditional uncertainty forecasts. We examine the inflation uncertainty forecasts from the Bank of England, the Banco...

How do households perceive the forecasting performance of the central bank? Using two novel experiments embedded in the Bundesbank's Survey on Consumer Expectations (total N = 9500), this article shows that the majority of German households underestimate the ECB's inflation forecasting accuracy....

We examine how private sector agents might learn a new monetary strategy that is adopted while at the ELB. Little can be discovered until the economy improves enough that rates would be near liftoff under the old strategy. Recessionary shocks would thus delay learning while large inflationary...

The European Central Bank's asset purchase programs, while intended to stabilize the economy, may have unintended side effects on financial stability. This paper aims at gauging the effects on financial markets, the banking sector, and lending to non-financial firms. Using a structural vector...

We tackle two questions in this paper: In the sovereign debt crisis, what moves the euro area inflation outlook and has the firm anchoring of medium to long-term inflation expectations been touched? Deriving densities from a new data set on options on the euro area harmonized index of consumer...

Evidence on the credibility of a central bank's inflation target typically refers to the anchoring of survey-based measures of inflation expectations. However, both the survey question and the anchoring criteria are only loosely connected to the actual inflation target used in monetary policy...

We study how households adjust their medium-term inflation expectations under the new ECB strategy. We find that survey respondents make little difference between the previous strategy of targeting inflation rates close to but below 2% and the new strategy with a symmetric 2% target. Yet,...