On September 3-4, 2009, SUERF and Utrecht University School of Economics jointly organized the 28th SUERF Colloquium on "The Quest for Stability" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The papers contained in this SUERF Study jointly published with DNB and Rabobank are based on contributions to this...

This study is an introduction to and summary of the 2002 Annual Meeting papers of the Royal Netherlands Economic Association. The general theme of this year's Annual Meeting is 'The role of wealth in the economy'. It is covered by 5 papers, which address the following topics: (i) household...

This paper examines whether the clarity of central bank communication about inflation has changed with the economic environment. We use readability statistics and content analysis to study the clarity of communication on the inflation outlook by seven central banks between 1997 and 2010....

Anchored inflation expectations help stabilize inflation. Previous results indicate that monetary policy has been effective in breaking the link between actual and expected inflation at the euro area level. In this paper we examine whether this is also true at the national level. We define the...

We investigate whether the anchoring properties of long-run inflation expectations in the United States, the euro area and the United Kingdom have changed around the economic crisis that erupted in mid-2007. We document that in these three economies, expectations measures extracted from...

Since its inception, the European Central Bank (ECB) has regarded communication as anintegral part of its monetary policy. This paper describes and evaluates ECB communications during the first decade of its operation.We conclude that, overall, ECB communication has contributed to the...

Central banks have become increasingly transparent during the last decade. One of the main benefits of transparency predicted by theoreticalmodels is that it enhances the credibility, reputation, and flexibility of monetary policy, which suggests that increased transparency should result in...

This paper studies the implications of globalisation for the effectiveness of monetary policy in large open economies, such as the euro area and the United States. The analysis allows for imperfect competition and an endogenous home bias in consumption. I find that globalisation (a reduction in...

We assess a New Keynesian macro-economic model that is supplemented with a micro-founded role for money in determining aggregate demand and supply in order to better describe monetary policy transmission. In this model welfare is higher if the monetary authority takes money growth explicitly...

There is a small, but growing, economics literature on the importance and effects of having monetary policy made by a committee, rather than by an individual. Complimenting this is an older and larger body of literature on groups in the other social sciences, particular in social psychology....