In 1994 the FOMC began to release statements after each meeting. This paper investigates whether the public’s views about the current path of the economy and of future policy have been affected by changes in the Federal Reserve’s communications policy as reflected in private sector’s...

Using intra-day data, we assess the impact of the press release on euro area monetary data on the different segments of the euro area yield curve. For this purpose, we estimate a relation between the “news” or “surprise” in the released data for annual M3 growth and the move in the...

This paper shows that the explanation of the decline in the volatility of GDP growth since the mid-eighties is not the decline in the volatility of exogenous shocks but rather a change in their propagation mechanism.

We study credible information transmission by a benevolent Central Bank. We consider two possibilities: direct revelation through an announcement, versus indirect information transmission through monetary policy. These two ways of transmitting information have very different consequences. Since...

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...

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...

While the established literature on central bank communication has traditionally dealt with communication of monetary policy messages to financial markets and the wider public, central bank communication on fiscal policy has so far received little attention. This paper empirically reviews the...

We study credible information transmission by a benevolent Central Bank. We consider two possibilities: direct revelation through an announcement, versus indirect information transmission through monetary policy. These two ways of transmitting information have very different consequences. Since...

Why do long-run interest rates respond to central bank communication? Whereas existing explanations imply a common set of signals drives short and long-run yields, we show that news on economic uncertainty can have increasingly large effects along the yield curve. To evaluate this channel, we...

We propose a Hawkish-Dovish (HD) indicator that measures the degree of 'hawkishness' or 'dovishness' of the media's perception of the ECB's tone at each press conference. We compare two methods to calculate the indicator: semantic orientation and Support Vector Machines text classification. We...