Central Bank communication has become, in the last period, a topic of increased interest both in academia, as well as in the process of conducting the monetary policy. This thesis addresses the communication of central banking and compares the Czech National Bank's (CNB) communication practices with the ones of the National Bank of Moldova (NBM) for the period of 2005 - 2010. Communication of both central banks is analyzed by compyling a Transparency Index, based on a detailed analysis of actual information disclosure by the two banks. In order to analyze how surprising are the monetary policy decisions in the two countries, an investigation about how much the short-term money market rates change after the monetary policy decision's announcement has been made. The results of the analyses show that the CNB has achieved almost full transparency in 2010 in conducting the monetary policy, while the NBM, even though registered a gradual increase in its transparency since 2005, still needs to put more effort into improving its communication practices. The research also reveals that the CNB manages to lower the pace of market surprises related to its monetary policy decisions, while in the case of NBM, the money market rates respond little to the policy rate changes. Also, in order to show the importance...

Central bank communication has become an important monetary policy tool. This is because it helps to improve the effectiveness of monetary policy by sharing information, which reduces uncertainty. Previous research on the topic has concentrated on central banks in developed economies, such as the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, and the Federal Reserve. This research contributes to the literature by providing insights from the perspective of emerging economies, where communications of Chinese and Indian central banks are examined. The first empirical chapter investigates the effectiveness of communication of People s Bank of China (PBOC) on Chinese financial markets: the interbank money market, the equity market, and foreign exchange markets, are analysed using time-series models. The main focus of the chapter includes an analysis of PBOC s credibility, construction of a new communication index on global economic outlook, more detailed communication indexes, and addressing how-to-communicate questions in the PBOC s communication strategies. The results indicate that the PBOC has credibility and its communication generally reduces volatility in these markets. The second empirical chapter looks at the role of the PBOC s communication in predicting policy rates, using an ordered probit model. The communication indexes constructed in the chapter cover both formal and informal communications of PBOC for 2009 to 2015 and a new communication index on money supply was also constructed. The main finding is that PBOC s communications (particularly on inflation) are useful for predicting PBOC s monetary policy stance. The money supply communication index has some, but not much predictability powers. Finally, the third empirical chapter compares central bank communications in China and India. The contribution of the chapter lies in the comparative analysis of two central banks communications of developing economies, which were overlooked in the extant literature. It shows that the communications on the countries monetary policy inclination have influence on macroeconomic variables of the countries, particularly, the short-term inflation expectations. The findings, therefore, suggest the effectiveness of communications as an unconventional monetary policy tool in emerging economies.

This thesis examines two closely related issues: (1) the ability of imperfect information models to explain some aspects of business cycle dynamics, and (2) the interaction between central bank communications and monetary policy. These issues are related because central bank communications can only be studied in models with imperfect information. In chapter 1, I investigate the ability of a noisy rational expectations model to generate plausible macroeconomic dynamics. The model allows for imperfect, heterogeneous information, and signal extraction from endogenous variables. I find that imperfect information significantly improves the model's ability to generate persistent, hump-shaped responses to a transitory monetary policy shock. This is achieved without the need for mechanical frictions. In addition, the model generates realistic inflation forecast errors. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between central bank statements about future policy and the degree of commitment. I allow the central bank to make (possibly vague) statements about its expected future policy. I begin by assuming that the central bank adopts a loss function which internalizes the bygone costs of deviating from such a pre-announced policy action. The resulting policy is a convex combination of pure discretion and full commitment. As the precision of central bank statements increases, this policy converges to the full commitment policy. I then show that this type of commitment to internalize bygone costs is sustainable only for moderate degrees of precision. Chapter 3 studies the impact of central bank communications about the state of the economy. In particular, I examine the extent to which increased central bank transparency creates a meaningful trade-off between beneficially conveying fundamental information and adversely contaminating observed data with the central bank's opinion. This question is addressed in a variant of the model from chapter 1. In this environment, both the central bank and private agents learn about the state of the economy from observations of endogenous variables. By making the central bank learn from endogenous variables, I am able to study the impact of communications precision on the bank's signal extraction problem.

This thesis examines two closely related issues: (1) the ability of imperfect information models to explain some aspects of business cycle dynamics, and (2) the interaction between central bank communications and monetary policy. These issues are related because central bank communications can only be studied in models with imperfect information. In chapter 1, I investigate the ability of a noisy rational expectations model to generate plausible macroeconomic dynamics. The model allows for imperfect, heterogeneous information, and signal extraction from endogenous variables. I find that imperfect information significantly improves the model's ability to generate persistent, hump-shaped responses to a transitory monetary policy shock. This is achieved without the need for mechanical frictions. In addition, the model generates realistic inflation forecast errors. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between central bank statements about future policy and the degree of commitment. I allow the central bank to make (possibly vague) statements about its expected future policy. I begin by assuming that the central bank adopts a loss function which internalizes the bygone costs of deviating from such a pre-announced policy action. The resulting policy is a convex combination of pure discretion and full commitment. As the precision of central bank statements increases, this policy converges to the full commitment policy. I then show that this type of commitment to internalize bygone costs is sustainable only for moderate degrees of precision. Chapter 3 studies the impact of central bank communications about the state of the economy. In particular, I examine the extent to which increased central bank transparency creates a meaningful trade-off between beneficially conveying fundamental information and adversely contaminating observed data with the central bank's opinion. This question is addressed in a variant of the model from chapter 1. In this environment, both the central bank and private agents learn about the state of the economy from observations of endogenous variables. By making the central bank learn from endogenous variables, I am able to study the impact of communications precision on the bank's signal extraction problem.

This dissertation presents three chapters addressing issues pertaining to monetary policy, information, and central bank communication. The first chapter studies optimal monetary policy in an environment where policy actions provide a signal of economic fundamentals to imperfectly informed agents. I derive the optimal discretionary policy in closed form and show that, in contrast to the perfect information case, the signaling channel leads the policymaker to be tougher on inflation. The strength of the signaling effect of policy depends on relative uncertainty levels. As the signaling effect strengthens, the optimal policy under discretion approaches that under commitment to a forward-looking linear rule, thereby decreasing the stabilization bias. This contributes to the central bank finding it optimal to withhold its additional information from private agents. Under a general linear policy rule, inflation and output forecasts can respond positively to a positive interest rate surprise when the signaling channel is strong. This positive response is the opposite of what standard perfect information New Keynesian models predict and it matches empirical patterns found by previous studies. Chapter 2 provides new empirical evidence supporting the predictions of the model presented in Chapter 1. More specifically, I find that the responses of inflation forecasts to interest rate surprises is especially positive when there is greater uncertainty regarding the previous forecast. Finally, Chapter 3 examines whether communications by the Federal Open Market Committee might have the ability to influence financial market responses to macroeconomic news. In particular, I am able to relate labor-related word use in FOMC statements and meeting minutes to the amount by which interest rates' response to labor-related news exceeds their response to other news. / Economics

v Abstract The aim of this thesis is to assess the effect of central bank communication on joint occurrence of extreme returns and on extreme movements shared by two stock markets. The research concentrates on the following aspects: predictability of increased share of countries experiencing extreme returns in the eurozone based on the nature of policymaker's statement and also a set of control variables, change in probability of extreme returns joint occurrence after president's speech, determinants of joint occurrence when non-standard measures were announced and finally, effect of crisis period. Additionally, determinants of shared extreme movements between particular countries are examined. The results suggest that communication nature or crisis are not significant predictors of extreme returns joint occurrence. Moreover, markets seem to react jointly to ECB president's speech only when they have extremely high returns. Furthermore, markets jointly react on days of nonstandard measures announcement differently. We also found that in the first quantile dovish statements tend to increase returns above their mean in case of Greece and Germany, and Greece and the UK. Rest of the pairs of countries have opposite reaction to dovish tone and communication is significant in the 95th quantile for the pair...

Abstract Based on the Romer and Romer (1989) methodology this paper analyzes behavior of the US Federal Reserve System (FED) and the Czech National Bank (CNB) during the recent crisis. It explores minutes and press releases from the meetings of the Bank Board of the CNB and the Federal Open Market Committee of the FED, i.e. on one hand from the side of a small open economy that has been hit mainly through decline in foreign demand, on the other from the side of a big closed economy, in which the recent crisis has originated. It compares reaction in interest rate and adequacy of unconventional measures with a prediction of a simple 'Taylor rule' (Taylor, 1993) and tries to evaluate the adequacy of the overall reaction of mentioned central banks to the crisis.

The aim of this thesis is to assess the effect of ECB's communication on financial market co- movements between Italy, Spain, Germany and France using MGARCH family of models. Author addresses partially the potential problem of endogeneity of central bank communication by using Composite indicator of systemic stress and excess liquidity. The author estimates the impact of ECB's communication on correlations of government bond yield changes using daily data from 2008 to 2014. For this purpose author employs bivariate diagonal BEKK(1,1) and bivariate scalar BEKK(1,1) with surprises of macroeconomic announcements under control. The results are consistent and robust for all models, the results suggest that communication does not have statistically significant effect on financial market correlations in the Euro area. Furthermore, author defines delta functions which describe and quantify the immediate and full effect of explanatory variables on conditional correlations in bivariate diagonal BEKK(1,1) and bivariate scalar BEKK(1,1). To the best of author's knowledge this thesis is the only one in the literature which examines this effect of ECB's communication by MGARCH models. Keywords: Financial markets, central bank communication, correlation, MGARCH, BEKK Author's e-mail: milankucera1@seznam.cz...

The topic of this diploma thesis is to measure and investigate the clarity of Financial stability reports from 27 European central banks. Using unbalanced panel data from 2004 to 2017 we found out variables that determine the level of clarity of Financial stability reports. Clarity indices are calculated by Flesch-Kincaid readability tests. Based on our results, we claim that the clarity of the Financial stability report is affected by the level of independence of the central bank and by non-housing macroprudential policy index. Furthermore, the clarity of Financial stability reports changes among years and especially during the financial crisis. According to spatial models, the distance between central banks really matters in the terms of the clarity of Financial stability reports.

This research analyses central bank communication on financial stability. First, most important international comparable features of the communication are identified, such as Financial Stability Reports, Stress tests, Financial soundness indicators, etc. These are then used for the construction of Financial stability transparency index (FST index) for 110 countries from 2000 to 2011. FST index is used to determine the most important drivers of central bank communication. In particular, the level of transparency towards financial stability depends most on monetary policy transparency, size and development of the economy. Finally, the impact of financial stability transparency on financial stability is under investigation. Using two proxies for financial stress, for the first time, evidence of the influence of central bank communication on financial soundness was found. It is concluded that the communication still has not reached its steady state and markets have only limited experience using it. However, the communication has a strong potential to influence financial stability in the future.