Increasing the diversity of policy committees has taken center stage worldwide, but whether and why diverse committees are more effective is still unclear. In a randomized control trial that varies the salience of female and minority representation on the Federal Reserve's monetary policy...

This paper introduces a reinforcement learning based approach to compute optimal interest rate reaction functions in terms of fulfilling inflation and output gap targets. The method is generally flexible enough to incorporate restrictions like the zero lower bound, nonlinear economy structures...

We show that if business cycles are driven by financial shocks, the interplay between the effective lower bound (ELB) and the costs of external financing can generate an additional supply-side channel, which causes a disconnect between inflation and output. In normal times, factor costs dominate...

This paper proposes a Skewed Stochastic Volatility (SSV) model to model time varying, asymmetric forecast distributions to estimate Growth at Risk as introduced in Adrian, Boyarchenko, and Giannone's (2019) seminal paper "Vulnerable Growth". In contrary to their semi-parametric approach, the SSV...

High-frequency changes in interest rates around FOMC announcements are an important tool for identifying the effects of monetary policy on asset prices and the macroeconomy. However, some recent studies have questioned both the exogeneity and the relevance of these monetary policy surprises as...

Using confidential daily data, we analyse how the intervention episode of the Bank of Israel (BOI) from 2013 to 2019 has affected the foreign value of the Israeli new shekel (ILS) and the expectations about its future value. We find that interventions amounting to US dollar (USD) 1 billion are...

This paper studies how banks’ balance sheets and funding costs interact in the transmission of monetary-policy rates to banks’ credit supply to firms. To do so, we use credit-registry data from Germany and Portugal together with the European Central Bank’s policy-rate cuts in mid-2014. The...

In this paper, we focus on the stabilizing role of cash from a society-wide perspective. Starting with conceptual remarks on the importance of money for the economy in general, special attention is paid to the unique characteristics of cash. As these become apparent especially during crisis...

We use a representative online survey to investigate the inflation expectations of German consumers and the credibility of the ECB's inflation target during the recent high inflation period. We find that credibility has trended downwards since summer 2021, reaching an all-time low in April 2022....

This paper studies the effects of harmonizing collateral policy in a monetary union. In 2007, the European Central Bank replaced national collateral lists with a single list specifying which assets euro area banks can pledge as collateral. Banks holding newly eligible assets experience a...