Who supported the Deutsche Bundesbank? an empirical investigation

Abstract The relevance of public support for monetary policy has largely been overlooked in the empirical central bank literature. We have constructed a new indicator for the support of the German Bundesbank and present descriptive and empirical evidence. We nd that major German interest groups were quite heterogeneous in judging a given policy stance. Empirically, we show that (a) public support can (at least partly) oset pressure from other organized groups and (b) accounting for popular support of the central bank allows to make more accurate forecasts of the short-term interest rate.