Central bank communication: New data and stylized facts from a century of Fed speeches

Thomas Lustenberger, Enzo Rossi and Anna Zeitz

No 2026-06, Working Papers from Swiss National Bank

Abstract: Drawing on a novel dataset of more than 10,000 speeches from 1914 to 2024, we track the evolution of Federal Reserve communication and identify three stylized facts. (1) Although the overall volume of speeches has declined over the past decade, the composition of Fed communication has remained notably consistent for forty years, with Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) presidents accounting for the majority of public engagements. Variation in communicative participation is driven primarily by dispositional factors, including professional background, gender, and other speaker-specific idiosyncrasies, rather than the particular time frame in which the speeches were delivered. (2) While governors' communication reacts to financial stability, FRB presidents' schedules remain decoupled from both regional shifts in their districts and broader macroindicators. (3) A "complexity paradox" has emerged: while the syntactic structure simplifies during crises, the conceptual density increases. When adjusted for abstractness, the communication patterns of governors and FRB presidents appear remarkably similar.

Keywords: Federal Reserve System; Central bank communication; Content analysis; Language complexity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 E52 E58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-mon
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:snb:snbwpa:2026-06

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