TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lucca,David O.
AU  - Trebbi,Francesco
TI  - Measuring Central Bank Communication: An Automated Approach with Application to FOMC Statements
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15367
PY  - 2009
Y2  - September 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15367
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15367.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David Lucca
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
33 Liberty Street
New York, NY  10045
E-Mail: david.lucca@ny.frb.org

Francesco Trebbi
University of British Columbia
1873 East Mall
Vancouver, BC, V6T1Z1
Canada
Tel: 604.218.5900
Fax: 604.822.5915
E-Mail: ftrebbi@mail.ubc.ca
AB  - We present a new automated, objective and intuitive scoring technique to measure the content of central bank communication about future interest rate decisions based on information from the Internet and news sources. We apply the methodology to statements released by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) after its policy meetings starting in 1999. Using intra-day financial quotes, we find that short-term nominal Treasury yields respond to changes in policy rates around policy announcements, whereas longer-dated Treasuries mainly react to changes in policy communication. Using lower frequency data, we find that changes in the content of the statements lead policy rate decisions by more than a year in univariate interest rate forecasting and vector autoregression (VAR) models. When we estimate Treasury yield responses to the shocks identified in the VAR, we find communication to be a more important determinant of Treasury rates than contemporaneous policy rate decisions. These results are consistent with the view that the FOMC releases information about future policy rate actions in its statements and that market participants incorporate this information when pricing longer-dated Treasuries. Finally, we decompose realized policy rate decisions using a forward-looking Taylor rule model. Based on this decomposition, we find that FOMC statements contain significant information regarding both the predicted rule-based interest rate and the Taylor-rule residual component, and that content of the statements leads the residual by a few quarters.
ER  -