Staff working papers

More Than Words: Fed Chairs’ Communication During Congressional Testimonies

Staff Working Paper 2022-20 Michelle Alexopoulos, Xinfen Han, Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Xu Zhang
We measure soft information contained in the congressional testimonies of U.S. Federal Reserve Chairs and analyze its effect on financial markets. Increases in the Chair’s text-, voice-, or face-emotion indices during these testimonies generally raise stock prices and lower their volatility.

Can Media and Text Analytics Provide Insights into Labour Market Conditions in China?

The official Chinese labour market indicators have been seen as problematic, given their small cyclical movement and their only-partial capture of the labour force. In our paper, we build a monthly Chinese labour market conditions index (LMCI) using text analytics applied to mainland Chinese-language newspapers over the period from 2003 to 2017.

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