More Than Words: A Textual Analysis of Monetary Policy Communication
Pongsak Luangaram, Warapong Wongwachara · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2017
This paper employs various tools from computational linguistics to monetary policy statements to gain exploratory insights into the nature of central bank communication. The sample was taken from a wide array of central banks, covering major central banks and others under the inflation-targeting (IT) regime, from 2000 to 2015. Three major aspects of communication were examined in this study, namely (i) *readability* – the ease with which a reader can understand a written text, (ii) *topics* – the key themes that are discussed in the policy statements, and (iii) *tones* – how positive/negative the outlook is in the central bank's language assessment.