When generating conditional forecasts in dynamic models it is common to impose the conditions as restrictions on future structural shocks. However, these conditional forecasts often ignore that there may be uncertainty about the future development of the restricted variables. Our paper therefore...

This paper discusses the significance of Central Bank of Nigeria's (CBN) monetary aggregates in the implementation of monetary policy. The Analytical Balance Sheet and monetary survey are shown to be useful tools in the analysis of monetary and credit developments in the economy. It also...

The decisions to reduce, leave unchanged, or increase (the price, rating, policy interest rate, etc.) are often characterized by abundant no-change outcomes that are generated by different processes. Moreover, the positive and negative responses can also be driven by distinct forces. To capture...

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...

In the tradition of Romer and Romer (2000), this paper compares staff forecasts of the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) for inflation and output with corresponding private forecasts. Standard tests show that the Fed and less so the ECB have a considerable information...

This paper investigates the extent to which euro area monetary policy has responded to evolving economic conditions in individual member states as opposed to the euro area as a whole. Based on a forward-looking Taylor rule-type policy reaction function, we conduct counterfactual exercises that...

We test for bias and efficiency of the ECB inflation forecasts using a confidential dataset of ECB macroeconomic quarterly projections. We investigate whether the properties of the forecasts depend on the level of inflation, by distinguishing whether the inflation observed by the ECB at the time...

This paper evaluates inflation forecasts made by Norges Bank which is a successful forecast targeting central bank. It is expected that Norges Bank produces inflation forecasts that are on average better than other forecasts, both naive forecasts, and forecasts from econometric models outside...

Dictionary approaches are at the forefront of current techniques for quantifying central bank communication. This paper proposes embeddings - a language model trained using machine learning techniques - to locate words and documents in a multidimensional vector space. To accomplish this, we...

The aim of this paper is to assess whether the findings of Romer and Romer (2000) on the superiority of staff forecasts are still valid today. The paper uses both latest available econometric techniques as well as conventional tests. Several tests for forecast rationality show that a necessary...