Intervention(s)
As part of its external activities, the ECB provides on-site expert lectures on topics related to monetary policy aimed at visitor groups with a good understanding of the ECB’s monetary policy. Those visitors have been potentially exposed to monetary policy issues during their education. They can be expected to have higher literacy scores than the average household and should be responsive to information treatments. Therefore, these sessions provide an ideal laboratory for our experiments. The treatment consisted of an intense briefing in the form of a lecture by a senior monetary policy expert from the ECB lasting around 90 minutes, with interactive elements resembling the Q&A session of the ECB President at the press conference. The presentations were given by different ECB monetary policy experts. Each presenter gave additional explanations about the ECB’s monetary policy during this session. Topics included the ECB’s assessment of the current economic situation, future outlook and underlying risks, the factors driving its decisions, the mandate and institutional setting of the ECB (including price stability goal, central bank independence, prohibition of monetary financing, voting), the ECB’s monetary policy strategy, the outcome of the ECB’s 2020/21 strategy review, the monetary policy tools including conventional and non-conventional monetary policy instruments, channels of monetary policy transmission. During the briefing session, visitors were invited to ask questions on monetary policy topics.