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Monetary Policy in the Media Spotlight: Sentiments, Signals, and Economic Impact

Firmin Ayivodji, Etienne Briand, Kevin Moran, Dalibor Stevanovic

arXiv 14 May 2026 · Econometrics

arXiv:2605.15092 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

News media coverage of monetary policy is not a passive transcript of central-bank communication: it filters announcements, macroeconomic news, and editorial choices into narratives that move expectations and policy decisions. We embed media sentiment into a behavioral New-Keynesian model in which the central bank reacts to sentiment and sentiment follows an explicit law of motion. We construct monetary-policy sentiment indicators from more than 50,000 Canadian newspaper articles using dictionary methods, transformer models, and a generative-AI framework. Media sentiment shifts household inflation and wage expectations, improves out-of-sample forecasts of GDP growth and inflation, and loads positively on the Bank of Canada's estimated Taylor rule once treated as endogenous. A Bayesian SVAR identifies anticipated and unanticipated monetary-policy shocks together with a narrative shock; the narrative shock contributes a non-trivial share of medium-horizon macroeconomic variance, and a counterfactual that shuts down the dynamic feedback from media sentiment attenuates the propagation of monetary policy to output and prices. %The results suggest that media narratives are an integral part of monetary-policy transmission, not merely an additional source of information.

Citation extraction

76
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distinct cited
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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Gabaix, Xavier (2020) A Behavioral New Keynesian model0.69351100%
2Pang, Ke and Shiamptanis, Christos (2024) Is the Bank of Canada concerned about inflation or the state of the economy?0.69351100%
3Andre, Peter and Haaland, Ingar and Roth, Christopher and Wiederholt… (2026) Narratives about the Macroeconomy0.64441100%
4D'Amico, Stefania and King, Thomas B (2023) What does anticipated monetary policy do?0.62411236%
5Ash, Elliott and Hansen, Stephen (2023) Text algorithms in economics0.58531100%
6Ayivodji, Firmin and Rauh, Christopher (2023) Can Media Narratives Predict House Price Movements? self0.58531100%
7Chahrour, Ryan and Nimark, Kristoffer and Pitschner, Stefan (2021) Sectoral media focus and aggregate fluctuations0.58531100%
8Nimark, Kristoffer P (2014) Man-bites-dog business cycles0.58531100%
9Romer, Christina D and Romer, David H (2000) Federal Reserve information and the behavior of interest rates0.58531100%
10Baker, Scott R and Bloom, Nicholas and Davis, Steven J (2016) Measuring economic policy uncertainty0.5112250%

Showing the top 10 of 76 scored citations.