This event is the keynote for the 6th BSIA Global Political Economy PhD Dissertation Workshop. It is open to the BSIA community and invited guests.
This paper surveys over 7,000 speeches of European central bankers and the ECB to assess their contents. Neither the size of the economy nor the monetary policy regime appears to be related to the frequency of communication via speeches. We then examine the content of the speeches using a structural topic model approach. Four topics dominate. They are: European integration, monetary policy and price stability, financial stability and a broad “out-of-the-box” topic. While interest in the overall topic of monetary policy has been stable over time, European integration fell out of favour in the period between the early days of the creation of the euro and the Brexit referendum. Speeches devoted to financial stability surged with the global financial crisis. Speeches from central bankers outside the euro area broadly follow these trends. However, many speeches from central and southern European central banks fall under the out-of-the box category. This suggests that central banks in these countries cover a broader range of topics than their European counterparts.
About the speaker
Pierre Siklos specializes in macroeconomics with an emphasis on the study of inflation, central banks, and financial markets. His research has been funded by domestic and international agencies and he has published in leading journals and book publishers in his field. In 1999, he was Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and in 2009, was William Evans Fellow at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. In 2008 he was Chairholder of the Bundesbank Foundation of International Monetary Economics at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Since 2008, he has been a member of the C.D. Howe Institute’s Monetary Policy Council, where he has been a Research Fellow since Aug. 2010. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). In 2015, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Bank for International Settlements; a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; a Visiting Fellow at the University of Tasmania; and a visiting Researcher at the Bank of Japan. He was WLU’s University Research Professor for the academic year 2000-2001 and was Director of the Viessmann European Research Centre from 2005-2014.
