Mapping the space of central bankers' ideas

Taejin Park, Fernando Perez-Cruz and Hyun Song Shin

No 1299, BIS Working Papers from Bank for International Settlements

Abstract: This paper explores the landscape of economic ideas as revealed in the machine learning embedding of a comprehensive dataset of central bank speeches. This dataset, maintained by the BIS, encompasses 19,742 speeches delivered by almost 1,000 officials from over 100 central banks over a period spanning three decades, from 1997 to 2025. As well as topic analysis of speeches at any moment in time, the evolution of the topics over time provides insights into how the focus of central bank thinking has been shaped by shifting policy challenges since 1997. Parsing the embedding both through topics and through time provides rich insights into how economic ideas have taken shape through communication practices of central banks worldwide. To demonstrate its utility, we have conducted a series of analyses that map the global landscape of monetary policy discourse. Furthermore, we construct a quantitative framework-referred to as the "space of central bankers' ideas"-which uncovers institutional patterns and highlights shifts in policy approaches over time.

Keywords: central bank communication; central bank speeches; AI; topic modeling; embeddings (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C38 C55 E52 E58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cba, nep-his, nep-hpe, nep-mac and nep-mon
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