It's not always about the money, sometimes it's about sending a message: Evidence of Informational Content in Monetary Policy Announcements

Abstract

This paper introduces a transparent framework to identify the informational content of FOMC announcements. We do so by modelling the expectations of the FOMC and private sector agents using state of the art computational linguistic tools on both FOMC statements and New York Times articles. We identify the informational content of FOMC announcements as the projection of high frequency movements in financial assets onto differences in expectations. Our recovered series is intuitively reasonable and shows that information disclosure has a significant impact on the yields of short-term government bonds.