In the context of sovereign debt crisis in Europe, a crisis entirely felt also in the direct relation between credit institutions, the National Bank of Romania (NBR) adopted a monetary policy strategy meant to determine the reinforcement of its image, by initiating in the autumn of 2011 a new...

On 1 June 2018 the ECB celebrated its 20th anniversary. This paper provides a comprehensive view of the ECB's monetary policy over these two decades. The first section provides a chronological account of the macroeconomic and monetary policy developments in the euro area since the adoption of...

On 1 June 2018 the ECB celebrated its 20th anniversary. This paper provides a comprehensive view of the ECB's monetary policy over these two decades. The first section provides a chronological account of the macroeconomic and monetary policy developments in the euro area since the adoption of...

This paper discusses the case for a money pillar in the European Central Bank's (ECB) monetary policy strategy. Time-series evidence for industrial countries based on frequency-domain and unobserved-components analysis suggests that money can play a useful role in gauging and constraining...

We use a mean-adjusted Bayesian VAR model as an out-of-sample forecasting tool to test whether money growth Granger-causes inflation in the euro area. Based on data from 1970 to 2006 and forecasting horizons of up to 12 quarters, there is surprisingly strong evidence that including money...

Many surveys of the ECB's monetary framework emphasize the inability of financial markets to correctly predict monetary policy decisions. At the same time, these surveys of financial market participants have given relatively high marks to the United States Federal Reserve and the Bank of England...

The ECB's objective of medium-term inflation below 2 percent has been portrayed by critics as ambiguous, asymmetric, and excessively stringent. This paper attempts a comprehensive evaluation of the trade-offs for the euro area and finds that: (1) in terms of guiding inflation expectations and...

Monetary aggregates continue to play an important role in the ECB's policy strategy. This paper revisits the case for money, surveying the ongoing theoretical and empirical debate. The key conclusion is that an exclusive focus on non-monetary factors alone may leave the ECB with an incomplete...

The paper presents a methodology for measuring the clarity of central bank communication, illustrating it with the case of the European Central Bank (ECB) in 1999-2007. The analysis identifies the ECB's written communication as clear about 95 percent of instances, which is comparable to, or even...

This paper outlines important lessons for monetary policy. In particular, the role of inflation targeting, which was much acclaimed prior to the financial crisis and since then has not lost much of its endorsement, is critically reviewed. Ignoring the relation between monetary policy and asset...