THE INTELLECTUAL IDEAS INSIDE CENTRAL BANKS: WHAT'S CHANGED (OR NOT) SINCE THE CRISIS?

I explore how the intellectual ideas inside central banks have shifted over the first two decades of the new century. To do this I collect every research paper published by advanced economy central banks and examine them using tools from computational linguistics. The analysis points to a shift in the intellectual focus, from a relatively macroeconomic perspective towards a less aggregated view. In part, these changes seem to reflect lessons from the 2008 financial crisis - for example, that macroeconomic models can only get you so far and that microeconomic data are useful for teasing out the causes of aggregate fluctuations. There has been an increase in the amount of research dedicated to the banking and household sectors and a reduction in the amount of intellectual effort invested in modelling the macroeconomy - though some of these shifts had already begun before the crisis. Consistent with this, the similarity of central banking research to that published in top macroeconomic journals has been widening since the crisis.

Automated summary

The study indicates a shift in the intellectual focus of central banks' research from macroeconomics to a more detailed perspective, reflecting lessons learned from the 2008 financial crisis that macroeconomic models have limitations and microeconomic data can reveal the causes of aggregate fluctuations.