Svensson (2006) argues that Morris and Shin (2002) is, contrary to what is claimed, pro-transparency. This paper re-examines the issue but with an important modification to the original Morris and Shin framework. Recognizing that central banks impact on the economy not only indirectly via public...

Using sector-level survey data for the universe of Japanese firms, we establish the positive co-movement in the firm’s expectations about aggregate and sector-specific demand shocks. We show that a simple model with imperfect information on the current aggregate and sector-specific components...

This paper characterizes equilibrium outcomes of extensive form games with incomplete information in which players can sign renegotiable contracts with third-parties. Our aim is to understand the extent to which third-party contracts can be used as commitment devices when it is impossible to...

FocusThe paper examines the relationship between monetary policy and market prices through the lens of central bank communication. Central bankers use forward guidance to steer market expectations of future monetary policy moves. At the same time, they rely on market prices to gauge the likely...

This study examines monetary policy and central bank communication when a monetary instrument signals the central bank's private information. A novel feature is that the central bank ex ante determines how much information it acquires and how much of this information it releases to the public....

This paper studies monetary policy under discretion when the central bank ex ante determines information to be acquired and made public. In a general setting, wherein a monetary instrument signals the central bank's private information, I show that an optimal information policy comprises the...

In this paper we examine whether publishing the information underlying the central bank's decisions is socially desirable. We show that opacity may lead to the same equilibrium as transparency. However, additional equilibria may emerge under opacity with adverse consequences for welfare....

We develop a DSGE model in which the policy rate signals the central bank's view about macroeconomic developments to incompletely informed price setters. The model is estimated with likelihood methods on a U.S. data set including the Survey of Professional Forecasters as a measure of price...

We study the two-way interaction between central banks and financial markets using a beauty contest framework. The analysis identifies when asset prices reveal useful information about fundamentals and when they reflect back the central bank’s pronouncements. In equilibrium, the central bank...

How much information should a central bank (CB) have about (i) policy objectives and (ii) operational shocks to the effect of monetary policy? We consider a version of the Barro–Gordon credibility problem in which monetary policy signals an inflation-biased CB's private information on both...