The question of how best to communicate monetary policy decisions remains a highly topical issue among central banks. Focusing on the experience of the European Central Bank, this paper studies how explanations of monetary policy decisions at press conferences are perceived by financial markets....

This paper provides an assessment of central bank transparency for the efficiency of monetary policy implementation, using the introduction of balance-of-risks assessments by the Federal Reserve as a testing device. We find that markets anticipated monetary policy decisions equally well under...

Can the central bank of a monetary union, whose objectives are exclusively defined in terms of union-wide variables, improve its performance by reacting to regional variables rather than to union-wide variables only? Our answer is not clear-cut. We find the improvement to be large when we use a...