More Than Words: A Textual Analysis of Monetary Policy Communication

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.