Both the Fed's defenders and critics focus on macroeconomic questions. What is the correct monetary policy? Does the economy need an “activist” Fed? Should the central bank intervene to reduce unemployment, or focus on keeping prices stable? Should the Fed target interest rates or nominal...

This study examines how the relationships between local governments and local enterprises moderate the effect of targeted monetary policies through different action-propagating mechanisms. First, we investigate the impact of monetary policies on enterprise investment in areas with different...

Central bank balance sheets swelled in size in response to the financial crisis of 2007-09. In this article we discuss what makes them different from the balance sheets of other institutions, how they've been used in the past, and how they might evolve in the future as means to implement novel...

This paper takes stock of external audit arrangements at central banks. Its focus is on the annual audit of central bank financial statements, as well as legal and institutional measures that support audit quality and independence. The paper outlines good practices in these areas and provides a...

This article discusses a small scale pilot to harmonise three Bank of England statistical and regulatory data forms. The primary purpose of the pilot was to assess opportunities for improved operational efficiency in regulatory reporting. The broader purpose was to demonstrate how common data...

This paper examines the important but not often discussed issue of accounting in central banks. It highlights the distinguishing factors that make the financial statements of central banks unique relative to those produced by other bodies. We begin by explaining why central banks produce...

This study examines how the relationships between local governments and local enterprises moderate the effect of targeted monetary policies through different action-propagating mechanisms. First, we investigate the impact of monetary policies on enterprise investment in areas with different...

This paper is the first attempt to investigate the performance of different learning rules in fitting survey data of household and expert inflation expectations in five core European economies (France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain). Overall it is found that constant gain learning...

This paper studies the role of narratives for macroeconomic fluctuations. We micro-found narratives as directed acyclic graphs and show how exposure to different narratives can affect expectations in an otherwise standard macroeconomic model. We capture such competing narratives in news media's...

Although it is generally accepted that consumer confidence measures are informative signals about the state of the economy, theoretical macroeconomic models designed for the analysis of monetary policy typically do not provide a role for them. I develop a framework with asymmetric information in...