How Much Information Do Monetary Policy Committees Disclose? Evidence from the FOMC's Minutes and Transcripts

Mikael Apel, Marianna Blix Grimaldi and Isaiah Hull
Additional contact information
Marianna Blix Grimaldi: Swedish National Debt Office

No 381, Working Paper Series from Sveriges Riksbank (Central Bank of Sweden)

Abstract: The purpose of central bank minutes is to give an account of monetary policy meeting discussions to outside observers, thereby enabling them to draw informed conclusions about future policy. However, minutes are by necessity a shortened and edited representation of a broader discussion. Consequently, they may omit information that is predictive of future policy decisions. To investigate this, we compare the information content of the FOMC's minutes and transcripts, focusing on three dimensions which are likely to be excluded from the minutes: 1) the committee's degree of hawkishness; 2) the chairperson's degree of hawkishness; and 3) the level of agreement between committee members. We measure committee and chairperson hawkishness with a novel dictionary that is constructed using the FOMC's minutes and transcripts. We measure agreement by performing deep transfer learning, a technique that involves training a deep learning model on one set of documents - U.S. congressional debates - and then making predictions on another: FOMC transcripts. Our findings suggest that transcripts are more informative than minutes and heightened committee agreement typically precedes policy rate increases.

Keywords: Central Bank Communication; Monetary Policy; Machine Learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D83 E52 E58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2019-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cba, nep-cmp, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.riksbank.se/globalassets/media/rapport ... -and-transcripts.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How Much Information Do Monetary Policy Committees Disclose? Evidence from the FOMC's Minutes and Transcripts (2022)
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:hhs:rbnkwp:0381

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Sveriges Riksbank (Central Bank of Sweden) Sveriges Riksbank, SE-103 37 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lena Löfgren ().