Flagships and tumbleweed: A history of the politics of gender justice work in Oxfam GB 1986–2015

This article contributes to scholarship on the political nature of feminists’ work in international development NGOs. The case study of Oxfam GB (OGB) is contemporary history, based on compiling a brief history of gender justice work between 1986 and 2014 and 18 months of part-time participant-observation fieldwork during 2014–15. I describe funding pressures and imperatives, contestations of meaning and power struggles within OGB and argue that gender justice becomes entangled in both internal and the external politics of international development. This is part of a wider research programme about how ideas on gender equality norms travel between and around development organizations, so I finally draw conclusions about how norms are contested and embodied. The shapeshifting political nature of feminist work challenges prevailing theories about how norms and ideas travel and take hold within organizations

The Impact of ECB Communication on Financial Market Expectations

This paper analyzes European financial markets' comprehension and interpretation of ECB communication signals. By applying a novel indicator developed by Berger et al. (2006), that quantifies the contents of the ECB's introductory statements, we find that communication affects the term structure of interest rates in the medium run over a horizon between five months to one year. Our results suggest that financial market agents expect the ECB to prepare them for a change in interest rates well in advance. However, judging upon the dynamics of the response, the exact timing of a decision is less foreseeable. Disentangling the effects of ECB statements on prices, the real and the monetary sector, we provide evidence that especially the ECB's interpretation and forecasts of price developments represent important news to financial market agents

Monetary Policy Committee Transparency: Measurement, Determinants, and Economic Effects

This paper studies monetary policy committee transparency (MPCT) based on a new index that measures central bankers' educational and professional backgrounds as disclosed through central bank websites. Based on a novel cross-sectional data set covering 75 central banks, we investigate the determinants of MPCT as well as its economic consequences. We find that past inflation, quality of institutional setup, and extent of Internet use in a country are important determinants of MPCT. MPCT has a robust and significantly negative impact on inflation variability, even after controlling for important macroeconomic variables and institutional transparency, as well as instrumenting MPCT in various ways

Optimal central bank design: Benchmarks for the ECB

Central bank design, ECB, ECB reform, Eurosystem, Federal central banks, D72, E58,