Central banks have intensified their communication with non-experts - an endeavour which some have argued is bound to fail. This paper studies English and German Twitter traffic about the ECB to understand whether its communication is received by non-experts and how it affects their views. It...

How do financial markets acquire information about upcoming monetary policy decisions, beyond their reaction to central bank signals? This paper hypothesises that sharing information among investors can improve expectations, especially in the presence of disagreement or uncertainty about the...

We estimate the sticky information Phillips curve model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major European economies. Our estimates imply that inflation expectations in France, Germany and the United Kingdom are updated about once a year, in...

Standard economic intuition suggests that asset prices are more sensitive to news than other economic aggregates. This has led many researchers to conclude that asset price data would be very useful for the estimation of business cycle models containing news shocks. This paper shows how to...

We document that compared to all other investor groups investment funds exhibit a distinctly procyclical behavior when financial-market beliefs about the probability of a euro-related, institutional rare disaster spike. In response to such euro disaster risk shocks, investment funds shed...

During his reign from 1979 to 2005, Pope John Paul II visited 129 countries, more than the 263 Popes before him combined. I document a significant increase in exports to trading partners with a relatively high share of Catholics following a Pastoral visit, leading to a non-negligible increase in...

We examine whether loan portfolio sectoral specialization provides informational advantages to banks, enabling better credit risk assessment. Using euro area credit register data, we compare probabilities of default assigned by specialized and non-specialized banks to the same borrowing firm...