The first part of this paper outlines the concept of democratic accountability of central banks, and compares the legal accountability of the ECB with some other central banks (Bank of Canada, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System). In the second part, we present a theory...

We study the characteristics of inflation targeting as a shock absorber, using quarterly data for a large panel of countries. To overcome an endogeneity problem between monetary regimes and the likelihood of crises, we propose to study large natural disasters. We find that inflation targeting...

There has been a remarkable rise in the transparency of monetary policy during the last two decades. This paper provides an overview of the ways in which central banks have been providing more information about their monetary policymaking. Furthermore, it reviews the theoretical literature on...

Many central banks discuss the introduction of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Empirical evidence suggests that households may differ in their willingness to hold CBDC. Against this background, this paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of different CBDC regimes in a New Keynesian...

The research work presented below addresses the possible concern of central bank independence through the development and application of econometric models. The complexity of the modelling has allowed a step further in corroborating that financial independence is not only linked to the...

Theory and practice of monetary policy have changed significantly over the past three decades. A very important part of today's monetary policy is management of the expectations of private market participants. Publishing and justifying the central bank's best forecast of inflation, output, and...

We integrate banks and the coexistence of bank and bond financing into an otherwise standard New Keynesian framework. There are two policy-makers: a central banker, who can decide on short-term nominal interest rates, and a macroprudential policy-maker, who can vary aggregate capital...

In this study, we perform a quantitative assessment of the role of money as an indicator variable for monetary policy in the euro area. We document the magnitude of revisions to euro area-wide data on output, prices, and money, and find that monetary aggregates have a potentially significant...

In this paper we investigate the effect of standard and non-standard monetary policy implemented by the ECB on income inequality in Italy. We use for the first time the survey microdata on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC, Istat) in a repeated cross-section experiment to build measures of...

Over the last decade a new consensus model has emerged in monetary macroeconomics, labelled New-Keynesian macroeconomics (Clarida et al., 1999). It consists of three simple building blocs: a forward-looking IS-equation that is derived from the optimization problem of a representative household,...