Using business survey data on German manufacturing firms, this paper provides tests for hypotheses formulated in capital market imperfection theories that predict distributional effects in the transmission of monetary policy. The business conditions of small firms are found to be somewhat more...

Using business survey data on German manufacturing firms, this paper provides tests for hypotheses formulated in capital market imperfection theories that predict distributional effects in the transmission of monetary policy. The business conditions of small firms are found to be somewhat more...

Since the financial crisis, central banks have stressed the role of trust and communication in connection with their objectives and strategies for aligning the public's inflation expectations with their own and, consequently, improving the effectiveness of monetary policy. Assessing how much the...

Exogenous measures of monetary policy shocks, directly derived from financial market information, are used in close (U.S.) and open (U.S.-Germany) economy VAR models to evaluate the robustness of the dynamic effect of monetary policy obtained from traditional identified VAR. The empirical...

In the aftermath of the euro cash changeover consumers’ inflation perceptions rose substantially in the euro area countries while actual inflation figures remained almost unchanged. During that period media reporting on the potentially large inflationary effect of the euro introduction...

The empirical literature on central banking has found measures of central bank independence/conservatism to be negatively correlated with inflation and inflation variance across countries. But the cross-country approach has been criticised for its focus on policy outcomes instead of policies,...

We assess empirically whether monetary policy announcements impact firm expectations. Two features of our data set are key. First, we rely on a survey of production and price expectations of German firms, that is, expectations of actual price setters. Second, we observe the day on which firms...

In this paper, we analyse the effects of objective and subjective knowledge about monetary policy, as well as the information search patterns, of German citizens on trust in the ECB. We rely on a unique representative public opinion survey of German households conducted in 2011. We find that...