How Informative Are Central Bank Minutes?

Mikael Apel and Grimaldi Marianna Blix ()
Additional contact information
Grimaldi Marianna Blix: General Staff Department, The Swedish National Debt Office

Review of Economics, 2014, vol. 65, issue 1, 53-76

Abstract: One characteristic feature of central banks today is that policy decisions are almost exclusively made by a committee rather than by a single policy maker. Another is that central banks endeavour to be transparent. Together, this has brought to the fore an important but so far unresolved issue: how much information about the committee’s deliberations should the central bank reveal? Does this kind of information make monetary policy easier to understand and predict, or does it make it harder? We address this issue by employing a novel method. We measure the sentiment and tone of the minutes of the Swedish central bank using an automated content analysis that converts the qualitative information in the minutes to a quantitative measure. We find that this measure is helpful in predicting future policy rate decisions.

Keywords: Central Bank Communication; Minutes; Content Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (46)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/roe-2014-0104 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lus:reveco:v:65:y:2014:i:1:p:53-76

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/roe/html

DOI: 10.1515/roe-2014-0104

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics is currently edited by Michael Berlemann

More articles in Review of Economics from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().