Monetary Policy Transparency:Lessons from Germany and the Eurozone

Iris Biefang-Frisancho and Peter Howells ()

No 410, Discussion Papers from University of the West of England, Department of Economics

Abstract: The conduct of monetary policy emphasises institutional arrangements which make monetary policy decision-making more ‘transparent’. Judged by these institutional features neither the Bundesbank, nor the ECB, score very highly. We test for (i) agents’ average ability to anticipate policy rate changes under the Bundesbank and the ECB and (ii) and agents’ forecasting unanimity of money market rates. Rising forecasting uncertainty may either be due to a lack of ECB transparency or to larger inflation and growth forecasting errors. Our results indicate that inflation forecast spreads widened amongst private agents and that inflation forecasting uncertainty increased the forecasting spread of money market rates

Keywords: transparency; yield curve; forecasting uncertainty; Bundesbank; ECB (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-eec, nep-fmk, nep-for, nep-mac and nep-mon
Date: 2004-12
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://carecon.org.uk/DPs/0410.pdf First version, 2004 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uwe:wpaper:0410

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from University of the West of England, Department of Economics
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by J Paul Dunne ().