Central bank communication plays an important role in shaping market participants’ expectations. This paper studies a simple nonlinear model of monetary policy in which agents have incomplete information about the economic environment. It shows that agents’ learning and the dynamics of the...

In the past few years, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has been using forward guidance about the federal funds rate in a more explicit way than ever before. This paper explores the market reaction to the forward guidance, with particular focus on the use of calendar dates and economic...

With short-term interest rates at the zero lower bound, forward guidance has become a key tool for central bankers, and yet we know little about its effectiveness. Standard medium-scale DSGE models tend to grossly overestimate the impact of forward guidance on the macroeconomy - a phenomenon we...

Over the last two decades, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the rate-setting body of the United States Federal Reserve System, has become increasingly communicative and transparent. According to policymakers, one of the goals of this shift has been to improve monetary policy...

Central banks worldwide have become more transparent. An important reason is that democratic societies expect more openness from public institutions. Policymakers also see transparency as a way to improve the predictability of monetary policy, thereby lowering interest rate volatility and...

We study the informational channel of financial contagion in the laboratory. In our experiment, two markets with correlated fundamentals open sequentially. In both markets, subjects receive private information. Subjects in the market opening second also observe the history of trades and prices...

We study common determinants of daily bid-ask spreads and trading volume for the bond and stock markets over the 1991-98 period. We find that spread changes in one market are affected by lagged spread and volume changes in both markets. Further, spread and volume changes are predictable to a...

This paper explores liquidity movements in stock and Treasury bond markets over a period of more than 1800 trading days. Cross-market dynamics in liquidity are documented by estimating a vector autoregressive model for liquidity (that is, bid-ask spreads and depth), returns, volatility, and...

We use daily survey data from Gallup to assess whether households' beliefs about economic conditions are influenced by surprises in monetary policy announcements. We first provide more general evidence that public confidence in the state of the economy reacts to certain types of macroeconomic...

"This paper explores the effects of central bank transparency on the performance of optimal inflation targeting rules. I assume that both the central bank and the private sector face uncertainty about the "correct" model of the economy and have to learn. A transparent central bank can reduce one...