Current best practice in central banking views a high level of monetary policy predictability as desirable. A clear distinction, however, has to be made between short-term and longer-term predictability. While short-term predictability can be narrowly defined as the ability of the public to...

Current best practice in central banking views a high level of monetary policy predictability as desirable. A clear distinction, however, has to be made between short-term and longer-term predictability. While short-term predictability can be narrowly defined as the ability of the public to...

Current best practice in central banking views a high level of monetary policy predictability as desirable. A clear distinction, however, has to be made between short-term and longer-term predictability. While short-term predictability can be narrowly defined as the ability of the public to...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the behaviour of interbank lending in Germany after a monetary policy impulse. Our VAR analysis shows that following a monetary contraction, the banking system as a whole attracts additional funds from foreign banks. Whereas small cooperative and savings...

This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

This paper investigates whether the degree and the nature of economic and monetary policy interdependence between the United States and the euro area have changed with the advent of EMU. Using real-time data, it addresses this issue from the perspective of financial markets by analysing the...

Monetary policy in the euro area is conducted within a multi-country, multi-cultural, and multi-lingual context involving multiple central banking traditions. How does this heterogeneity affect the ability of economic agents to understand and to anticipate monetary policy by the ECB? Using a...

The paper shows that there is a substantial degree of heterogeneity in the ability of Fed watchers to forecast US monetary policy decisions. Based on a novel database for 268 professional forecasters since 1999, the average forecast error of FOMC decisions varies 5 to 10 basis points between the...

Inflation targeting (IT) had originally been introduced as a device to bring inflation down and stabilize it at low levels. Given the current environment of persistently weak inflation in many advanced economies, IT central banks must now bring inflation up to target. In this paper, the author...

Mortgages constitute the largest part of household debt. An essential choice when taking out a mortgage is between fixed-interest-rate mortgages (FRMs) and adjustable-interest-rate mortgages (ARMs). However, so far, no comprehensive cross-country study has analyzed what determines household...