This study sets out to investigate whether central banks are able to efficiently manage the communicative challenge of pandering to the different demands of distinct target audiences—households, firms, banks and the government. The empirical methodology for this analysis builds on the growing literature analyzing central bank communications to better understand the political and financial implications of monetary policy. We hope to contribute to this field of research by 1) creating a new database of over fifty years of speeches 2) devising a new method for analyzing communications that takes into account different audiences, and 3) providing empirical evidence for the observation that monetary policy is not neutral, i.e., that communications are positively or negatively biased in favor of some economic groups over others. The results of this analysis show that central bankers communicate differently in response to a speaker’s audience. The political and financial implications suggest that central bank communications may inspire more confidence and higher efficiency in achieving stable long-term interest rates when communications are targeted.
Data, web scraping tools and econometric modeling codes for analysing FED central bank communications
The macroeconomic data (sector-specific interest rate differentials, productivity and Taylor rules) are in this folder.
The tools for analyising the data including the tone analysis and econometric model can be found in this folder.
The tools for collecting the data and setting up the databse itself can be found in the Data Mining folder.