There is a broad consensus in the literature that costs of information processing and acquisition may generate costly disagreements in expectations among economic agents, and that central banks may play a central role in reducing such dispersion in expectations. This paper analyses empirically...

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...

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous high-income countries encountered heightened vacancy rates and labour shortages, which persisted into 2023. This paper examines the dynamics underlying labour market fluctuations in advanced economies, such as cyclical movements, structural shifts...

A slanted-L curve is well-suited to represent the non-linearity of the celebrated Phillips curve. We show this using cross-country data of major industrialized economies since 2009, including the inflationary surge of the 2020s. At high unemployment rates, an increase in demand reduces...

Using data from the period 1970-1991, Romer and Romer (2000) showed that Federal Reserve forecasts of inflation and output were superior to those provided by commercial forecasters. In this paper, we show that this superior forecasting performance deteriorated after 1991. Over the decade...

Monetary policy analysts often rely on rules-of-thumb, such as the Taylor rule, to describe historical monetary policy decisions and to compare current policy to historical norms. Analysis along these lines also permits evaluation of episodes where policy may have deviated from a simple rule and...

Within a decision-making group, such as the monetary-policy committee of a central bank,group members often hold differing views about the future of key economic variables. Such differences of opinion can be thought of as reflecting differing sets of judgement. This paper suggests modelling each...

This paper takes up the issue of the flexibility of inflation targeting regimes, with the specific goal of determining whether the monetary policy of the Bank of England, which has a formal inflation target, has been any less flexible than that of the Federal Reserve, which does not have such a...

In a simple macromodel with forward-looking expectations, this Paper looks into disclosure policy when a central bank has private information on future shocks. The main result is that advance disclosure of forecasts of future shocks does not improve welfare, and in some cases is not desirable as...