We explore empirically the theoretical prediction that public information acts as a focal point in the context of the U.S. monetary policy. We aim at establishing whether the publication of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) inflation forecasts affects the cross-sectional dispersion of private...

We quantify the informational content of statements issued by the interest-rate setting committee of the Central Bank of Brazil (COPOM), building on the methodology developed by Lucca and Trebbi (2011). Using Google search queries, we measure the extent to which each COPOM statement is perceived...

Monetary policy increasingly relies on steering market expectations about future policy. This paper identifies a monetary policy news shock based on a VAR model. A monetary news shock is equivalent to new information about the Fed's future monetary policy becoming available today. One example of...