  This paper shows that disregarding the information effects around the
European Central Bank monetary policy decision announcements biases its
international spillovers. Using data from 23 economies, both Emerging and
Advanced, I show that following an identification strategy that disentangles
pure monetary policy shocks from information effects lead to international
spillovers on industrial production, exchange rates and equity indexes which
are between 2 to 3 times larger in magnitude than those arising from following
the standard high frequency identification strategy. This bias is driven by
pure monetary policy and information effects having intuitively opposite
international spillovers. Results are present for a battery of robustness
checks: for a sub-sample of ``close'' and ``further away'' countries, for both
Emerging and Advanced economies, using local projection techniques and for
alternative methods that control for ``information effects''. I argue that this
biases may have led a previous literature to disregard or find little
international spillovers of ECB rates.
