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...

This article compares two types of monetary policy rules - the Taylor-Rule and the Orphanides-Rule - with respect to their forecasting properties for the policy rates of the European Central Bank. In this respect the basic rules, results from estimated models and augmented rules are compared....

In a large sample of countries across different geographic regions and over a long period of time, we find limited country- and variable-specific effects of central bank transparency on forecast accuracy and their dispersion among a large set of professional forecasts of financial and...

This paper proposes that an important instrument of monetary policy of the Bundesbank, is how it communicates with the public. We argue that communication by senior central bank officials represents an instrument of monetary policy that complements changes in interest rates. Moreover, the...

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...

In this paper, we analyze the long-run behavior and short-run dynamics of stock markets across some selected developed and emerging economies - namely the United States, the Euro Area, Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea, Thailand and Brazil - in the Cointegrated...

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...

In this paper, we analyze the long-run behavior and short-run dynamics of stock markets across some selected developed and emerging economies – namely the United States, the Euro Area, Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea, Thailand and Brazil – in the Cointegrated...

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...