Following the experience of the global financial crisis, central banks have been asked to undertake unprecedented responsibilities. Governments and the public appear to have high expectations that monetary policy can provide solutions to problems that do not necessarily fit in the realm of...

What institutional arrangements for an independent central bank with a price stability mandate promote good policy outcomes when unconventional policies become necessary? Unconventional monetary policy poses challenges. The large scale asset purchases needed to counteract the zero lower bound on...

Under ordinary circumstances, the fiscal implications of central bank policies tend to be seen as relatively minor and escape close scrutiny. The global financial crisis of 2008, however, demanded an extraordinary response by central banks which brought to light the immense power of central bank...

The ruling of the German Federal Constitutional Court and its call for conducting and communicating proportionality assessments regarding monetary policy have been the subject of some controversy. However, it can also be understood as a way to strengthen the de-facto independence of the European...

The Federal Reserve's muddled mandate to attain simultaneously the incompatible goals of maximum employment and price stability invites short-term-oriented discretionary policymaking inconsistent with the systematic approach needed for monetary policy to contribute best to the economy over time....

A number of contributions to research on monetary policy have suggested that policy should be asymmetric near the lower bound on nominal interest rates. As inflation and economic activity decline, policy should ease more aggressively than it would in the absence of the lower bound. As activity...

The complexity resulting from intertwined uncertainties regarding model misspecification and mismeasurement of the state of the economy defines the monetary policy landscape. Using the euro area as laboratory this paper explores the design of robust policy guides aiming to maintain stability in...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the state of macroeconomicmodeling and the use of macroeconomic models in policy analysis has come under heavy criticism. Macroeconomists in academia and policy institutions have been blamed for relying too much on a particular class of...

We study the effects of forward looking communication in an environment of rising inflation rates on German consumers' inflation expectations using a randomized control trial. We show that information about rising inflation increases short- and long-term inflation expectations. This initial...