This paper looks at the voting patterns of internal and external members of the MPC to investigate how far there are differences between insiders and outsiders. We make three contributions. First, we assess the extent to which the Bank of England internally generated forecasts explain the MPC...

We evaluate the degree of gradualism and inaction in UK monetary policy over the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) period (1997-2007) at the quarterly and the monthly frequency. After accounting for misspecification in standard Taylor rules, we find little evidence for gradualism. A measure of...

The paper assesses the communication strategies of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank and their effectiveness. We find that the effectiveness of communication is not independent from the decisionmaking process in the committee. The paper shows that the Federal...

The paper shows that central bank communication is a key determinant of the market’s ability to anticipate monetary policy decisions and the future path of interest rates. Comparing communication policies by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the ECB since 1999, we find that...

Media coverage of monetary policy actions is a central channel of a central bank’s communication with the wider public, and thus an important factor for its credibility and policy effectiveness. This paper analyses the coverage which ECB monetary policy decisions receive in the print media,...

The paper shows that there is a substantial degree of heterogeneity in forecast accuracy among Fed watchers. Based on a novel database for 268 professional forecasters since 1999, the average forecast error of FOMC decisions varies 5 to 10 basis points between the best and worst-performers...

The paper provides a systematic comparison of the Eurosystem, the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan. These monetary authorities exhibit somewhat different status and tasks, which reflect different historical conditions and national characteristics. However, widespread changes in central...

The question how best to communicate monetary policy decisions remains a highly topical issue among central banks. Focusing on the experience of the European Central Bank, this paper studies how explanations of monetary policy decisions at press conferences are perceived by financial markets....

Transparency has become an almost universal virtue among central banks. The paper tests empirically, for the case of the Federal Reserve, two hypotheses about central bank transparency derived from the debate of Morris and Shin (2002) and Svensson (2006). First, the paper finds that the...

We study credible information transmission by a benevolent Central Bank. We consider two possibilities: direct revelation through an announcement, versus indirect information transmission through monetary policy. These two ways of transmitting information have very different consequences. Since...