This paper presents novel causal evidence on the relationship between various communication channels employed by central banks and households' expectations about future inflation. In a pre-registered randomized survey experiment administered in 2022, we examine adjustment of inflation...

In this paper, we analyse the effects of objective and subjective knowledge about monetary policy, as well as the information search patterns, of German citizens on trust in the ECB. We rely on a unique representative public opinion survey of German households conducted in 2011. We find that...

The design and analysis of optimal monetary policy is usually guided by the paradigm of homogeneous rational expectations. Instead, we examine the dynamic consequences of implementation strategies, when the actual economy features expectational heterogeneity. Agents have either rational or...

We investigate the role of consumer confidence in the transmission of monetary policy shocks from an empirical and theoretical perspective. Standard VAR based analysis suggests that an empirical measure of consumer confidence drops significantly after a monetary tightening and amplifies the...

We study how financial market participants process news from four major central banks - the Bank of England (BoE), the Bank of Japan (BoJ), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the Federal Reserve (Fed), using a novel survey of 450 financial market participants from around the world. Our results...

We show that price level stabilization is not optimal in an economy where agents have incomplete knowledge about the policy implemented and try to learn it. A systematically more accommodative policy than what agents expect generates short term gains without triggering an abrupt loss of...

Time-variation in disagreement about inflation expectations is a stylized fact in surveys, but little is known on how disagreement interacts with the efficacy of monetary policy. This paper fills this gap in providing theoretical predictions of monetary policy shocks for different levels of...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model in which the policy rate signals the central bank's view about macroeconomic developments to price setters. The model is estimated with likelihood methods on a U.S. data set that includes the Survey of Professional Forecasters as a measure of price...

We develop and estimate a general equilibrium model to quantitatively assess the effects and welfare implications of central bank transparency. Monetary policy can deviate from active inflation stabilization and agents conduct Bayesian learning about the nature of these deviations. Under...

We show that policy uncertainty about how the rising public debt will be stabilized accounts for the lack of deflation in the US economy at the zero lower bound. We first estimate a Markov-switching VAR to highlight that a zero-lower-bound regime captures most of the comovements during the Great...