We develop and apply a procedure to test the welfare implications of a beauty and non-beauty contest based on survey forecasts of interest rates and yields in a large country sample over an extended period of time. In most countries, interest rate forecasts are unbiased and consistent with both...

A monetary economy comprises a vast array of market-clearing interest rates. Central banks exert a direct influence over only a narrow subset of these rates: the rate at which they supply marginal funds to the commercial banking system. Accordingly, the market interest rates which impinge upon...

Revised September 2016. In this paper, I use a statistical model to combine various surveys to produce a term structure of inflation expectations--inflation expectations at any horizon--and an associated term structure of real interest rates. Inflation expectations extracted from this model...

This paper describes segregated balance accounts (SBAs), a concept for a new type of account that could provide increased competition for deposits, reduce system-wide balance sheet costs, and improve the transmission of monetary policy by facilitating greater pass-through of interest on excess...

Interest rate surprises around FOMC announcements reveal both the surprise in the monetary policy stance (the pure policy shock) and interest rate movements driven by exogenous information about the economy from the central bank (the information shock). In order to disentangle the effects of...

In a floor system of monetary policy implementation, the central bank remunerates bank reserves at or near the market rate of interest. Some observers have expressed concern that operating such a system will have adverse fiscal consequences for the public sector and may even require the...

Central banks worldwide have become more transparent. An important reason is that democratic societies expect more openness from public institutions. Policymakers also see transparency as a way to improve the predictability of monetary policy, thereby lowering interest rate volatility and...

As a particular form of transparency, nowadays some central banks publish their interest rate forecasts while many others refuse to do that. Whether the publication is good or bad for economic performance and social welfares is now a hotly debatable subject. This paper provides a review of the...

In 1994 the Federal Reserve System moved to a more transparent reporting of monetary policy. In this paper we first discuss the evolution of Federal Reserve transparency in U.S. and second we test its effectiveness. We assess the empirical impact of monetary policy transparency on the...