The effects of central bank’s verbal guidance: evidence from the ECB

Maddalena Galardo and Cinzia Guerrieri ()
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Cinzia Guerrieri: LUISS Guido Carli

No 1129, Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: 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 main determinants of our index and estimate the unexpected component. Second, we investigate the effects of the identified change in verbal guidance on daily movements in forward money market rates between September 2007 and December 2015. Our results show that financial markets’ expectations on future short-term interest rates react to a communication shock about the future: after controlling for the standard policy rate shock and the announcement of unconventional monetary policies, the effect turns out to be negative and larger for longer horizons. This suggests that verbal guidance has proven to be an effective policy instrument for signalling an accommodative monetary policy stance.

Keywords: central bank communication; textual analysis; European Central Bank; signalling channel; unconventional monetary policy; event-study analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E43 E44 E52 E58 E61 G14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-eec, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_1129_17

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