How Much Information Do Monetary Policy Committees Disclose? Evidence from the FOMC's Minutes and Transcripts
通过对比美联储FOMC会议纪要和完整记录，发现记录中包含会议纪要未披露的预测未来政策的信息，如委员会和主席的鹰派程度及成员意见一致性。
Abstract The purpose of central bank minutes is to give an account of monetary policy meeting discussions to outside observers, thereby enabling them to draw informed conclusions about future policy. However, minutes are by necessity a shortened and edited representation of a broader discussion. Consequently, they may omit information that is predictive of future policy decisions. To investigate this, we compare the predictive content of the Federal Open Market Committee's (FOMC) minutes and transcripts, focusing on dimensions that are likely to be excluded from the minutes, such as the committee's degree of hawkishness, the chairperson's degree of hawkishness, and the level of agreement between committee members. We measure committee and chairperson hawkishness with a new dictionary that is constructed using the FOMC's minutes and transcripts. Agreement is measured using a technique we import from the machine learning literature. We also show that transcripts contain predictive content that is not included in FOMC minutes, macroeconomic variables, financial variables, forecasts, or federal funds rate futures.