The Basel III regulation explicitly prescribes the use of Hodrick-Prescott filters to estimate credit cycles and calibrate countercyclical capital buffers. However, the filter has been found to suffer from large ex-post revisions, raising concerns on its fitness for policy use. To investigate...

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...