Attempts by governments to stop bubbles by issuing warnings seem unsuccessful. This paper examines the effects of public warnings using a simple model of riding bubbles. We show that public warnings against a bubble can stop it if investors believe that a warning is issued in a definite range of...

Transparency has become an almost universal virtue among central banks. The paper tests empirically, for the case of the Federal Reserve, two hypotheses about central bank transparency derived from the debate of Morris and Shin (2002) and Svensson (2006). First, the paper finds that the...

We advance the hypothesis and establish empirically that investors' expectations adjust slowly to Central Banks' messages. From the videos of post-FOMC-meeting press conferences, we extract the words, and timestamp them at the millisecond. We align the transcripts with high-frequency data for...

This paper studies the social value of public information in environments without common knowledge of the data-generating process. We show that the stronger the coordination motive behind agents' behaviour is, the more they use private or public signals in the way that they suspect others are...

Central banks worldwide have become more transparent. An important reason is that democratic societies expect more openness from public institutions. Policymakers also see transparency as a way to improve the predictability of monetary policy, thereby lowering interest rate volatility and...

Central bank independence and transparency have become best practice in monetary policy. This paper cautions that transparency about economic information may not be beneficial in the absence of central bank independence. The reason is that it reduces monetary uncertainty, which could make the...

Recently, several central banks have abandoned the usual secrecy in monetary policy and become very transparent. This paper provides an explanation for this puzzling fact, focussing on the disclosure of central bank forecasts. It shows that transparency reduces the inflationary bias and gives...

In contrast to the once prevailing norm of secrecy and opaqueness, transparency has now become one of the main features characterising the conduct of monetary policy. Detailed analysis of eleven OECD central banks shows that communication practices have converged markedly in the direction of...