Does clarity make central banks more engaging? Lessons from ECB communications
Federico Maria Ferrara and
Siria Angino
LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library
Abstract:
Despite increasing communication efforts, it may be difficult for central banks to engage the public, as their language is often too difficult to understand for most citizens. Focusing on the case of the European Central Bank (ECB), we hypothesise that greater communication clarity is conducive to stronger engagement. We rely on readability metrics to measure the clarity of ECB communications. We show that communication clarity is a significant and robust predictor of the media engagement generated by the ECB with its speeches, press conferences and tweets. Our findings are validated by a placebo test and have significant policy implications for central bank communication.
Keywords: Central Bank communication; clarity; ECB; engagement; media; readability metrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F3 G3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2022-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-mac and nep-mon
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)
Published in European Journal of Political Economy, 1, September, 2022, 74. ISSN: 0176-2680
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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/112968/ Open access version. (application/pdf)
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Journal Article: Does clarity make central banks more engaging? Lessons from ECB communications (2022) 
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:112968
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