The lecture notes describe different views in analysing the relationships between the central banking activities – i.e. monetary and banking policies – and the business cycle, using a modified workhorse AS AD model, in order to include in the simplest way uncertainty, expectations and the...

Speeches are an important vehicle for central bankers to convey individual views on the preferred policy stance. In this paper, we employ an automated text linguistic approach to create an indicator that measures the tone of the 1,618 speeches delivered by members of the Governing Council (GC)...

We examine the degree and sources of disagreement between the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and the Federal Reserve's (Fed's) staff about the appropriate policy rate for the period 1987-2011. For that purpose, we compute a counterfactual interest rate for the Fed's staff , based on its...

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between certain characteristics of incumbent central bank governors and their interest-rate-setting behavior. We focus on (i) occupational backgrounds, (ii) party affiliation, and (iii) experience in office and estimate augmented Taylor rules for 20...

In this paper, we explore the determinants of media coverage of Federal Reserve (Fed) communications. Our sample covers all 344 forward-looking communications made in the period May 1999-May 2004. We find, first, that there is a higher likelihood of media coverage for monetary policy reports and...