The (Home) Bias of European Central Bankers: New Evidence Based on Speeches *

Hamza Bennani and Matthias Neuenkirch

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Speeches are an important vehicle for central bankers to convey individual views on the preferred policy stance. In this paper, we employ an automated text linguistic approach to create an indicator that measures the tone of the 1,618 speeches delivered by members of the Governing Council (GC) during the period 1999M1− 2014M4. We then relate this variable to euro-area and national macroeconomic forecasts. Our key findings are as follows. First, inflation and growth expectations have a positive and significant impact on the hawkishness of a speech. Second, different growth expectations across the euro area and different preferences significantly explain discrepancies across speakers. Third, the voiced preferences of presidents of the national central banks (NCB) largely coincide with the level of independence their central banks had at the time of the Maastricht Treaty. However, in general, there are not much differences between members of the Executive Board and the NCB presidents. Fourth, we find some evidence that central bankers adjust the gist of their speeches depending on whether they talk at home or abroad and before or after a GC meeting. Finally, differences in central banker preferences are the key source of variation in their speeches before the financial crisis.

Keywords: European Central Bank; Governing Council; Monetary Policy; National Interests; Speeches (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-06-27
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04206062
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Applied Economics, 2016, 49 (11), pp.1114-1131. ⟨10.1080/00036846.2016.1210782⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-04206062/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The (home) bias of European central bankers: new evidence based on speeches (2017)
Working Paper: The (Home) Bias of European Central Bankers: New Evidence Based on Speeches (2017)
Working Paper: The (Home) Bias of European Central Bankers: New Evidence Based on Speeches (2014)
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:hal:journl:hal-04206062

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2016.1210782

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD (hal@ccsd.cnrs.fr).