We use data on speeches held by members of the European Central Bank's (ECB) Executive Board to analyze whether clarity of central bank communication has increased over time. Employing readability measures as proxy variables, we find that clarity of information provision is trending upward since...

We assess the role of capital goods imports and inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) as transmission channels through which major emerging economies (BRICs, i.e., Brazil, Russian Federation, India and China) could catch up with advanced source countries in terms of total factor...

We examine variations in the South-North ratios (emerging vs. industrialized countries) of energy and labor intensities driven by imports. We use the novel World Input-Output Database (WIOD) that provides bilateral and bisectoral data for 40 countries and 35 sectors for 1995-2009. We find...

We analyze the determinants of average individual inflation uncertainty and disagreement based on data from the European Central Bank’s Survey of Professional Forecasters. We empirically confirm the implication from a theoretical decomposition of inflation uncertainty that disagreement is an...

We propose to treat survey-based density expectations as compositional data when testing either for heterogeneity in density forecasts across different groups of agents or for changes over time. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed test has more power relative to both a bootstrap...

We investigate the question of whether macroeconomic variables contain information about future stock volatility beyond that contained in past volatility. We show that forecasts of GDP growth from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Professional Forecasters predict volatility in a cross-section of...

Using novel data on speeches held by members of the European Central Bank's Executive Board, we investigate whether monetary policy transparency has increased over time. With respect to the general public as the target audience, our findings suggest that the European Central Bank successfully...

Based on a new survey of German households, we investigate the role that information channels and lifetime experience play in households' inflation expectations. We show that the types of information channels that households use to inform themselves about monetary policy are closely related to...

Using data from the European Central Bank's Survey of Professional Forecasters, we analyse the role of ex-ante conditioning variables for macroeconomic forecasts. In particular, we test to which extent the heterogeneity, updating and ex-post performance of predictions for inflation, real GDP...

We examine variations in the South-North ratios (emerging vs. industrialized countries) of energy and labor intensities driven by imports. We use the novel World Input-Output Database (WIOD) that provides bilateral and bisectoral data for 40 countries and 35 sectors for 1995-2009. We find...