We are interested, in this paper, in studying the effects that central banks exert on private sector forecasts by means of their transparency and communication measures. We analyze the impact of central bank transparency on the accuracy of the consensus forecasts (usually calculated as the mean or the median of the forecasts from a panel of individual forecasters) for a series of macroeconomic variables: inflation, Real output growth and the current account as a share of GDP for 7 advanced economies. Interestingly, while it is found of significance of central bank transparency and communication measures on forecasts themselves, there appear some limits of the same measures when we study their impact on forecast errors. Our findings, indeed, suggest that deviations of the economic forecast data from the realized ones (RGDP and the current account as a share of GDP) are a bit affected by the central bank transparency measures considered in the paper. Inflation forecast errors, especially, are not affected at all by those measures. A possible explanation (among others) could be attributed to the inefficiency of the mean forecasts. Inefficiency of the consensus forecasts is not a new issue from a theoretical point of view, but its empirical relevance is for the first time (to our knowledge) questioned on data extracted from the Economist poll of forecasters. More particularly, our paper extracts practical implications over the effectiveness of transparent announcements in forecast formation process. We rely on two noisy information models, though having different mechanisms (Kim et al, 2001; Morris and Shin, 2002) both of which are consistent with overweighting issue to explain the inefficiency of the consensus forecast.
It is argued in literature that transparency may be detrimental to welfare. [14] suggest reducing the precision of public information or withholding it. The latter seems to be unrealistic. Thus, the issue is not whether central bank should disclose or not its information, but how the central bank should disclose it. We consider a static coordination game (a class of games with multiple pure strategy) in which the private sector receives n semi-public information plus their specific information, and we analyze the impact on the private sector's welfare. The paper consists of three parts: (1) By making assumption that no costs are attached to the provision of private information, we determined the conditions under which the central bank faces a trade-off between enhancing commonality and the use of more precise, but fragmented information. Such intermediate transparent strategies may prevent the bad side of public information from overpowering the good side of it. (2) The latter result is found even in presence of positive externalities. (3) Introducing costs to that framework in equilibrium shows that strategic substitutability between semi-public and private precisions is a very likely outcome.
One of the focuses of recent literature has been the macroeconomic effects of macroprudential policy instruments. The innovation of this paper is that it studies the effects of transparent macro-prudential policies on price stability. The results presented herein provide the first empirical evidence that macroprudential transparency can aid to achieve stable inflation in emerging and developing countries. The effect is necessarily transmitted through reduced occurrence of banking crises. We also record a particular advantage of macroprudential transparency for non-inflation targeting countries. Overall, the results are robust to the use of two proxies of price stability.
In this paper, we propose to compare different partial transparency regimes in order to determine the optimal diessmination policy by the central bank, using an experimental approach. A treatment dedicated to the benchmark situation (where information is fully released) is also available. Our experiment is based on subsequent framework of Morris and Shin (2002), Cornand and Heinemann (2008) and Trabelsi (2012). The predictive power of K-level reasoning is an issue that is addressed also in this paper. Our experiment indicates that-when fully disclosed-players overreact to public information and this overreaction is efficiently reduced when the degree of publicity decreases (i.e. when the fragmentation measure increases). The average weight assigned to common signal decreases over treatments, especially when we establish partial transparent strategy (i.e. fragmented information). The results provide support both for and against global games theoretical predictions. In fact, although players overreact to public signal, their behavior is inconsistent with theoretical equilibrium, which means that the destabilizing effect of public information is less pronounced experimentally than when it does in theory. This is not the case when public information is fragmented; subjects' behavior does approach equilibrium. These observations coincide with both a collective and an individual analyses of behavior.
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