We examine how the language used by central bank officials in public press conferences influences stock returns in the euro area. In line with the concept of Odyssean Forward Guidance, we find that using constraining language to express policy commitment increases the effectiveness of Forward...

This paper documents that ECB announcements increase the stock market volatility in the euro area (EA) on the same day. I consider two volatility measures from January 1998 to May 2019. First, a realized volatility measure uses intraday data for 8 different stock market indices. Second, a range...

Successfully managing a course back to normality ("exit") will depend crucially on the central banks' ability to communicate effectively a credible strategy for an orderly exit from such kind of policies. In this context, clear, deliberate, coordinated messages that are anchored in the central...

Using an event-study design, we investigate monetary policy interest-rate-to-performance sensitivity of the European banking sector over the 07/2012-06/2017 period when interest rates were (close to) zero. We apply the Wordscores approach to introductory statements of ECB's Governing Council...

In this paper we propose a new indicator of central bank's verbal guidance, which measures communications about the future based on the frequency of future verbs in monetary policy statements. We consider the press conferences of the European Central Bank as a test case. First, we analyze the...

Central bank communication has changed dramatically over the past decade, with some central banks providing guidance about or explicit forecasts of likely future policy rates. One frequently made argument against the provision by central banks of such guidance or forecasts is that it runs the...

This paper analyzes the ECB communication, focusing in particular on its transparency dimension. We posit that if the ECB is transparent about its future policy decisions, then we should be able to forecast fairly well its future interest rate setting behavior. We find that the predicting...

How do financial markets acquire information about upcoming monetary policy decisions, beyond their reaction to central bank signals? This paper hypothesises that sharing information among investors can improve expectations, especially in the presence of disagreement or uncertainty about the...

We empirically examine how complexity of ECB communications affects financial market trading based on high-frequency data from European stock index futures trading. Our sam-ple covers ECB press conferences between January 2009 and December 2017, during which unconventional monetary policy...

This paper examines whether central bank communication stabilises euro area inflation expectations through the information and news channel. A novelty of the study is its use of data from Google Analytics on ECB website traffic as proxy for visitors’ attention to its communication. We conduct...