Central banks no longer set the short-term interest rates that they use for monetary policy purposes by manipulating the supply of banking system reserves, as in conventional economics textbooks; this process normally involves little or no variation in the supply of central bank liabilities. In...

Most macroeconomic data is continuously revised as additional information becomes available. We suggest that revisions of data is an important source of uncertainty about the state of the economy. This paper evaluates the quality of major real macroeconomic Euro area variables, published by...

The paper investigates real-time output gap estimates for the euro area obtained from various unobserved components (UOC) models. Based on a state space modelling framework, three criteria are used to evaluate real-time estimates, i.e. standard errors, unbiasedness and conditional inflation...

In this analysis, the informational content of central bank rhetoric is assessed based on the experience with the ECB since 1999. Among the ECB's communication channels we focus on the monthly press conferences. Based on a counting of certain signal words we construct a wording indicator...

In order to fight the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, monetary and fiscal policy announced a large variety of support packages which are often unprecedented in size. In this paper, we provide an empirical analysis of the responses of European financial markets to these policy...

As the coronavirus pandemic spread across the globe in early 2020, the European Central Bank as well as national governments in the euro area enacted or announced numerous economic policy measures to counteract the severe economic consequences of the resulting lockdowns. In this paper, the...