This Paper, which extends earlier work by Filardo and Guinigundo (2008) and Nelson (2008), reports on a survey conducted in 2007 on the communication practices of 32 members of the Central Bank Governance Network. The questionnaire sent to Network members was divided into two main parts. The...

We examine howthe verbal complexity of ECB communications affectsfi-nancial market trading based on high-frequency data fromEuropean stock index futures trading. Studying the 34 events between May 2009 and June 2017, during which the ECB Governing Council press conferences covered unconventional...

We empirically examine how complexity of ECB communications affects financial market trading based on high-frequency data from European stock index futures trading. Our sam-ple covers ECB press conferences between January 2009 and December 2017, during which unconventional monetary policy...

Leaks of confidential information emanating from public institutions have been the focus of a long-standing line of research. Yet, their determinants as well as their potential impact on public views and on policy effectiveness remain elusive. To address this gap, we study leaks from central...

It is argued in literature that transparency may be detrimental to welfare. Morris and Shin (2002) suggest reducing the precision of public information or withholding it. The latter seems to be unrealistic. Thus, the issue is not whether central bank should disclose or not its information, but...

This paper studies monetary policy under discretion when the central bank ex ante determines information to be acquired and made public. In a general setting, wherein a monetary instrument signals the central bank's private information, I show that an optimal information policy comprises the...

This study examines monetary policy and central bank communication when a monetary instrument signals the central bank's private information. A novel feature is that the central bank ex ante determines how much information it acquires and how much of this information it releases to the public....

In this paper we examine whether publishing the information underlying the central bank's decisions is socially desirable. We show that opacity may lead to the same equilibrium as transparency. However, additional equilibria may emerge under opacity with adverse consequences for welfare....

We study the general problem of information design for a policymaker—a central bank—that communicates its private information (the ``state") to the public. We show that it is optimal for the policymaker to partition the state space into a finite number of ``clusters” and to communicate to...

This paper investigates the characteristics of central bank websites across a large sample of central banks. We systematically derive and quantify these characteristics across three dimensions: text, visual presentation, and website performance. We then conduct a survey to isolate the main...