Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics

Working Papers in Economics,
University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

No 811: Evolution of topics in central bank speech communication

Magnus Hansson ()
Additional contact information
Magnus Hansson: Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University, Postal: P.O. Box 640, SE 40530 GÖTEBORG, Sweden

Abstract: This paper studies the content of central bank speech communication from 1997 through 2020 and asks the following questions: (i) What global topics do central banks talk about? (ii) How do these topics evolve over time? I turn to natural language processing, and more specifically Dynamic Topic Models, to answer these questions. The analysis consists of an aggregate study of nine major central banks and a case study of the Federal Reserve, which allows for region specific control variables. I show that: (i) Central banks address a broad range of topics. (ii) The topics are well captured by Dynamic Topic Models. (iii) The global topics exhibit strong and significant autoregressive properties not easily explained by financial control variables.

Keywords: Central bank communication; Monetary policy; Textual analysis; Dynamic topic models; Narratives

JEL-codes: C38; C55; E52; E58

28 pages, October 2021

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