ECB Projections as a Tool for Understanding Policy Decisions

The European Central Bank publishes inflation projections quarterly and we aim to establish empirically whether they influence private inflation forecasts and whether they may be considered as an enhanced means of implementing policy decisions by facilitating private agents’ information processing. We provide original evidence that ECB inflation projections do influence private inflation expectations positively, and that ECB projections convey signals about future ECB rate movements. This paper suggests that ECB projections enable private agents to correctly interpret and predict policy decisions.