Monetary Policy Committees differ in the way the interest rate proposal is prepared and presented in the policy meeting. In this paper we show analytically how different arrangements could affect the voting behaviour of individual MPC members and therefore policy outcomes. We then apply our...

In this paper, we explore the determinants of media coverage of Federal Reserve (Fed) communications. Our sample covers all 344 forward-looking communications made in the period May 1999-May 2004. We find, first, that there is a higher likelihood of media coverage for monetary policy reports and...

Sentiment analysis is applied to the Federal Reserve's documents relating to the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). A new method of rating the sentiment of texts is developed through the creation of a 100 000 word sentiment dictionary, and is used to estimate the sentiment of the Beige Book...