ECB’s Lane: Surveys Playing Prominent Role in Monetary Policy Analysis

23 July 2024

By Isabel Teles – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Executive Board member Philip Lane on Tuesday said that the weight of the data provided by the surveys conducted by the ECB was increasing in the monetary policy analysis.

Speaking at a joint conference of the ECB, International Monetary Fund and IMF Economic Review, Lane said, ‘[L]ast week is a good example [of how] surveys play an increasingly prominent role in our monetary policy analysis, and we combine these surveys with datasets on bank-level characteristics, firm-level characteristics and household-level characteristics.’

Surveys and granular datasets strengthened the credibility of research on the macroeconomic impacts of heterogeneity, he said.

‘The combination of methodological developments and the increased availability of granular data is facilitating much richer analysis and more informative quantitative estimation of the impact of various types of shocks and, crucially, the impact of various types of policy measures’, he said.

Granular data on wages, especially the set provided by the ECB Wage Tracker, allowed interpretations of wage developments in the euro area and shed light on the connection between wages and prices, he said.