Past empirical research on monetary policy in open economies has found evidence of the 'delayed overshooting', the 'forward discount' and the 'exchange rate' puzzles. We revisit the effects of monetary policy on exchange rates by applying Uhlig's (2005) identification procedure that involves...

Using a randomized controlled trial, we study whether showing German respondents a graph plotting the European Central Bank's inflation target alongside inflation in the euro area from 1999 to 2017 affects respondents' trust in the ECB. The treatment has, on average, no significant effect on the...

Starting in summer 2014, markets began to build up expectations that the European Central Bank (ECB) would embark on large-scale sovereign bond purchases. The ECB's Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) was eventually announced on 22 January 2015 and purchases started in March. Both during the...

The present paper studies the consequences of conflicting narratives for the transmission of monetary policy shocks. We focus on conflict between the presidents of the ECB and the Bundesbank, the main protagonists of monetary policy in the euro area, who often disagreed on policy over the past...

We estimate a monetary policy reaction function for the Bundesbank and use it as a benchmark to assess the monetary policy of the ECB since the launch of the euro in January 1999. We find that euro interest rates are low relative to this benchmark. We consider several possible reasons for this,...

Policy counterfactuals based on estimated structural VARs routinely suggest that bringing Alan Greenspan back in the 1970s' United States would not have prevented the Great Inflation. We show that a standard policy counterfactual suggests that the Bundesbank - which is near-universally credited...

Using the recursive unit root test by Phillips et al. (2011) we show that the Target balances of the German Bundesbank have been explosive from the beginning of 2009 to the beginning of 2013. By implementing a full-allotment policy and reducing the required minimum quality of collaterals in...

In this paper, we analyse the effects of objective and subjective knowledge about monetary policy, as well as the information search patterns, of German citizens on trust in the ECB. We rely on a unique representative public opinion survey of German households conducted in 2011. We find that...

We analyse German citizens' knowledge about monetary policy and the European Central Bank (ECB), as well as the public's use of mass communication media to obtain information about the ECB. We employ a unique representative public opinion survey of German households conducted in 2011. We find...