Central Bank Communication Index

01/01/2023 : Following the Strategy review of the ECB, we observed large change in the Introductory Statement of the Press conference. While the changes started under the Presidency of C. Largarde, we find a sort of discontinuity. We are both having more and more troubles maintaining a coherence on our classification that convers 15 years of ECB statements under 3 presidents. Therefore, we will no longer update the CBcomindex. However, the website will remain open and all its content available.

The Central Bank Communication Index (CBCI) measures the content of European Central Bank (ECB) press conferences introductory statement since 2006. Every month and then since January 2015 every 6 weeks, the President of the ECB details, reading a statement, the central bank monetary policy decisions and the economic situation of the Euro Area. The press conference starts at 14:30 CET and its calendar is available here.

The CBCI provides empirical scores of the inclination of introductory statements (available on the ECB website) using textual analysis. It differentiates :

Content related to the economic outlook of the Euro Area including information on output, price developments and monetary aggregates.
Content related to monetary policy decisions including both conventional and unconventional policies annoucements and information on future decisions.

Monetary Policy and Economic Outlook Indicators

You can zoom out by double cliking on the graph.

How to cite : Picault M., Renault T. (2017), Words are not all created equals : a new measure of ECB communication, Journal of International Money and Finance, 79, 136-156.

Update History:
03/05/2021 : We apologize for the important delay in the previous updates. The year 2020 did not go as expected... Next week, a large update that will include the whole years 2019 and 2020 will be available.
13/09/2019 : We updated the database to include all Introductory Statements until June 2019 (included).
27/08/2018: After a long waiting period, the data are updated to include all press conferences until June 2018. We do apologize for the late update. Next update in November 2018.
07/12/2017: All data up to November 2017 can be downloaded here. The coming updates will happen after each press conference. Next update : January 2017.
20/10/2017: All data up to March 2017 can be downloaded here. Next update : November 2017.
25/09/2017: The lexicon is now available here. We will update in the coming days all graphs and download sections to include all ECB press conferences between January 2006 and March 2017 (included). The remaining press conferences will be added in the coming weeks.
11/09/2017: Following the publication of the methodology in the Journal of International Money and Finance, a major update of the data is schedule for the end of this week.
March 2017: Creation of the website.