https://macropaperwarehouse.com/authors/kilian-rieder/Kilian RiederHugo -- gohugo.ioen-ushttps://macropaperwarehouse.com/papers/central-bank-communication-by-the-economics-of-monetary-policy-leaks/https://macropaperwarehouse.com/papers/central-bank-communication-by-the-economics-of-monetary-policy-leaks/<p><strong>Research Question</strong></p> <p>This paper investigates the economics of monetary policy leaks — anonymous disclosures of confidential information by insiders to the media — focusing on three central questions: (1) Are leaks random accidents, strategic individual disclosures, or institutionally authorized &ldquo;plants&rdquo;? (2) Do leaks shape public (financial market) views, and by how much? (3) Can attributed (named) communication by central bank officials mitigate the effects of leaks?</p> <p><strong>Data and Setting</strong></p> <p>The authors study the Eurosystem (ECB and euro area National Central Banks) over January 2002 to December 2021. Their primary data source is a novel database of 368 unique policy-relevant leaks — assembled by manually filtering and classifying more than a million news items from Reuters, Bloomberg, and Market News International archives — with precise minute-level timestamps. Topics covered include: policy rates (178 leaks), unconventional monetary policy/UMP (207 leaks), economic growth (47), inflation (41), and euro exchange rate (36); individual leaks may cover multiple topics. They complement this with a dataset of 7,883 attributable public statements by ECB Governing Council members, identified via keyword filtering and machine learning classification of the Reuters News Archive.</p>