Course overview
Central banks do more than set an overnight interest rate. They publish statements, forecasts, minutes, speeches, and guidance; markets and households interpret those messages; researchers then try to recover the policy news inside them. The course connects the theory of communication to the practical problems of measuring expectations, identifying surprises, and analysing language as data.
The four lectures form a cumulative argument. Lecture 1 establishes why communication can be policy. Lecture 2 asks how expectations can be measured. Lecture 3 isolates monetary-policy surprises and traces their effects. Lecture 4 treats communication itself as an empirical object.
Learning outcomes
After completing the course, students should be able to:
- Explain how credibility, transparency, and institutional design condition the force of communication.
- Define an expectation by agent, variable, horizon, moment, jurisdiction, and probability measure.
- Compare survey, market-based, and textual measures and diagnose their characteristic wedges.
- Derive the intuition behind futures-based target surprises and meeting-month calendar weights.
- Distinguish target, path, and information components in policy announcements.
- Design a high-frequency event study with a defensible window, treatment, outcome, and estimand.
- Translate tone, readability, timing, and public attention into measurable communication variables.
- State clearly what an empirical design identifies—and what it does not.
Four-lecture schedule
| Day | Lecture | Central question | Empirical object |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Central-bank communicationCredibility, uncertainty, anchoring, independence, forward guidance | When can words change economic behaviour? | Message → attention → beliefs → decisions |
| 02 | Measuring expectationsSurveys, futures, probability measures, risk and timing wedges | What exactly is being measured when we say “expectations”? | Latent beliefs and imperfect traces |
| 03 | Monetary policy surprisesTarget and path factors, high-frequency identification, spillovers | Which part of a policy announcement is genuinely new? | Announcement-window asset-price changes |
| 04 | Communication as text dataTone, readability, attention, release design, staged disclosure | How do we turn language into a credible treatment? | Documents, exposure, interpretation, outcomes |
Teaching approach
Concept first
Every technical device is introduced by the economic object it is meant to recover. Definitions come before formulas.
Wedges visible
Each proxy is analysed through the forces that separate it from the target: timing, risk, liquidity, attention, language, and selection.
Design explicit
Empirical examples are read as designs: treatment, window, comparison, outcome, estimand, and threats.
Background and preparation
The lectures assume familiarity with basic macroeconomics and regression analysis. Prior exposure to asset pricing, event studies, or text analysis is helpful but not required. The mathematical emphasis is on interpretation rather than lengthy derivation.
- Before each lecture, read its overview on the Slides page and define the key object in your own words.
- Bring one current or historical example of a central-bank announcement that appeared to surprise markets.
- After class, use the Study Guide to reconstruct the argument without looking at the slides.
Course materials
Two formats, one course
Use the interactive HTML decks for the live visual sequence and the PDFs for stable reading, annotation, and download. Both formats are collected on the Slides page.