This working paper offers some considerations on the monetary policy framework of the European Central Bank. The trade-offs arising from adopting a point target configuration over a range target one are assessed in terms of their flexibility vs. inflation anchoring properties. This layout is...

The paper answers three questions.(1) Does it matter if a central bank suffers a large capital loss? (2) Can the central bank become insolvent? (3) When, how and by whom should the central bank be recapitalised?

Anniversaries are occasions for remembrance and reflections on one's history. Many central banks take the occasion of an anniversary to publish books on their history. In this essay we discuss five recent books on the history of central banking and monetary policy. In these volumes, the Great...

The days when secrecy and opacity were the bywords of central banking are gone. The advent of inflation targeting in the early 1990s acted as the catalyst for enhanced transparency and communications in the conduct of monetary policy. In the wake of the 2007 - 09 global financial crisis, this...

Inflation expectations are a key determinant of actual and future inflation and thus matter for the conduct of monetary policy. We study how firms form their inflation expectations using quarterly firm-level data from the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey, spanning the 2001 to 2015...

Since 1991, the Bank of Canada has had an inflation‐targeting (IT) framework established by a joint agreement between the Bank and the Government of Canada. The framework is reviewed every five years as part of the process for renewing the inflation‐control agreement. This discussion paper...

We construct a 23-country panel data set to consider the effect of central bank projections and forward guidance on private-sector forecast disagreement. We find that central bank projections and forward guidance matter mainly for private-sector forecast disagreement surrounding upcoming policy...

Inflation expectations are a key determinant of actual and future inflation and thus matter for the conduct of monetary policy. We study how firms form their inflation expectations using quarterly firm-level data from the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey, spanning the 2001 to 2015...

The ECB's price stability mandate has been defined by the Treaty. But the Treaty has not spelled out what price stability precisely means. To make the mandate operational, the Governing Council has provided a quantitative definition in 1998 and a clarification in 2003. The landscape has changed...

What institutional arrangements for an independent central bank with a price stability mandate promote good policy outcomes when unconventional policies become necessary? Unconventional monetary policy poses challenges. The large scale asset purchases needed to counteract the zero lower bound on...