Central Bank Communication and Transparency: The ECB and the European Parliament

Abstract

This paper considers a range of important issues concerning the transparency and accountability of central banks with particular emphasis on the so-called monetary Dialogue, i.e., the regular appearances of the President of the European Central Bank (ECB) before the European Parliament (EP). In order to highlight the key issues of central bank communication and the management of expectations referring to a practical institutional example, we comment on the role the Monetary Dialogue in the context of an evolving monetary policy. Communication is finally described as a policy option in terms of minimising risk in the context of exit from unconventional monetary policies and of the signalling channel which refers to what the public learns from announcements of unconventional monetary policy operations such as Quantitative Easing.