This paper provides an empirical assessment of the power of forward guidance at different horizons, shedding new light on the strength of the "forward guidance puzzle". Our identification strategy allows us to disentangle the change in future interest rates stemming from deviations from the...

Fed's monetary policy announcements convey a mix of news about different kinds of conventional and unconventional policies and about the economy. Financial market responses to these announcements are very leptokurtic: often tiny, but sometimes large. I estimate the underlying structural shocks...

This note proposes an update to Figure 1 in "Macroeconomic Shocks and their Propagation" in the Handbook of Macroeconomics of 2016 (Ramey, 2016). Figure 1 of Ramey (2016) reports Impulse-Response Functions (IRFs) of variables of interest to a shock in the Federal Funds Rate, following the...

Central bank announcements move financial markets. The response of inflation and growth expectations, on the other hand, is often small or even counterintuitive. Based on tick-by-tick futures prices on bonds and stock prices, I confirm these seemingly puzzling results for the euro area and...

Central bank announcements have strong effects on interest rates, but small or even counterintuitive effects on economic expectations. Based on tick-by-tick futures prices on bonds and stock prices, I confirm these seemingly puzzling results for the euro area and provide evidence that they are...

The dynamic effects of ECB announcements, disentangled into pure monetary policy and central bank information shocks, on the euro (EUR) exchange rate are examined using a Bayesian Proxy Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model fed with high-frequency data. Contractionary monetary policy shocks result...

Inflation in advanced economies is low by historical standards but there is no threat of deflation. Slower economic growth is caused by supply-side constraints rather than low inflation. Below-the-target inflation does not damage the reputation of central banks. Thus, central banks should not...

Interest rate surprises around FOMC announcements reveal both the surprise in the monetary policy stance (the pure policy shock) and interest rate movements driven by exogenous information about the economy from the central bank (the information shock). In order to disentangle the effects of...

We use three different indicators based on inflation expectations to measure central bank credibility in 9 countries in Central and Eastern Europe. We quantify credibility using differences between official inflation targets and inflation expectations as well as differences between inflation...