We analyse German citizens' knowledge about monetary policy and the European Central Bank (ECB), as well as the public's use of mass communication media to obtain information about the ECB. We employ a unique representative public opinion survey of German households conducted in 2011. We find...

This paper investigates the information content of the Norges Bank's key rate projections. Wavelet spectrum estimates provide the basis for estimating jump probabilities of short- and long-term interest rates on monetary policy announcement days before and after the introduction of key rate...

This paper studies ECB and Bundesbank communication on monetary policy during the first years of the European Economic and Monetary Union. We study whether statements by different (groups of) central bankers have been contradictory and whether differences have diminished over time. We find that...

In a New Keynesian model with asymmetric information and learning we show that publication of macroeconomic projections and of the future interest rate path by the central bank can improve macroeconomic outcomes. However, the gains from publishing interest rate paths are small relative to those...

Using intra-day data, we assess the impact of the press release on euro area monetary data on the different segments of the euro area yield curve. For this purpose, we estimate a relation between the "news" or "surprise" in the released data for annual M3 growth and the move in the interest...

In this paper, we study the influence of central bank transparency and informal central bank communication on the formation of money market expectations. The sample covers nine major central banks from January 1999 to July 2007. We find, first, that transparency reduces the bias in money market...

Wordscores uses word frequencies to extract information from texts with known policy positions. Wordscores uses this information to estimate the unknown policy positions of so - called virgin texts. We apply Wordscores to the ECB President's introductory statements following Governing Council...

One characteristic feature of central banks today is that policy decisions are almost exclusively made by a committee rather than by a single policy maker. Another is that central banks are considerably more transparent than they used to be. Together, this has brought to the fore an important...

The Communication strategy for central banks is traditionally interlinked with one of their important mandates – conduct of monetary policy. Credibility to central bank actions in the process is achieved by keeping the market expectations more closely synchronised with its own, through the art...