Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly important aspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge new scholarly literature on central bank communication —mostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this...

Public opinion influences politicians, and therefore influences public policy decisions. What are the roles of self-interest, knowledge, and ideology in public opinion formation? And how do people learn about economic issues? Using a new, specially-designed survey, we find that most respondents...

The 5th joint SUERF/Bank of Finland joint conference was held in Helsinki on 13 June 2013. The general theme of the conference was to focus on the regulatory reforms after the global financial crisis and, in particular, how structural reforms of banking ("Volcker, Vickers and Liikanen") could...

Central banks are increasingly reaching out to the general public to motivate and explain their monetary policy actions. One major aim of this outreach is to guide inflation expectations; another is to ensure accountability and create trust. This article surveys a rapidly-growing literature on...

Keynote lecture prepared for the Norges Bank research workshop "Monetary Policy Committees," Oslo, September 6-7, 2007.