Identifying monetary policy shocks: A natural language approach by Borağan Aruoba, Thomas Drechsel published by VOXEU (5/2022).
The recent surge in inflation has put central banks back into the spotlight. This column proposes a novel method to determine exogenous changes in monetary policy. Using information in the language of documents that economists at the Federal Reserve Board prepare for Federal Open Market Committee meetings, it predicts changes in the target interest rate and obtains a measure of monetary policy shocks as the residual. The dynamic responses of macroeconomic variables to the identified shock measure are consistent with the theoretical consensus, and the estimated shocks are not contaminated by the ‘Fed information effect’.
