We use data on speeches held by members of the European Central Bank's (ECB) Executive Board to analyze whether clarity of central bank communication has increased over time. Employing readability measures as proxy variables, we find that clarity of information provision is trending upward since...

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....

This paper investigates the financial market effects of the ECB's communication on the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP). Using data for 10 euro area countries, we first analyse the impact of different communication channels such as press releases, ECB blog contributions, speeches and...

We study the effects of central bank communication about financial stability on individuals’ expectations and risk-taking. Using a randomized information experiment, we show that communication causally affects individuals’ beliefs and investment behavior, consistent with an expectations...

Overnight money market rates are the predominant operational target of monetary policy. As a consequence, central banks have redesigned the implementation of monetary policy to keep the deviations of the overnight rate from the key policy rate small and short-lived. This paper uses fractional...

This paper investigates why financial market experts misperceive the interest rate policy of the European Central Bank (ECB). Assuming a Taylor-rule-type reaction function of the ECB, we use qualitative survey data on expectations about the future interest rate, inflation, and output to discover...

How do the media affect public support for democratic institutions in a fragile democracy? What role do they play in a dictatorial regime? We study these questions in the context of Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. During the democratic period, when the Weimar government introduced progovernment...

The game-theoretical analysis of this paper shows that stress tests that cover the entire banking sector (macro stress tests) can be performed by institutional supervisors to improve welfare. In a multi-receiver framework of Bayesian persuasion we show that a banking authority can create value...