What Do Central Bankers Talk About? Evidence From the BIS Archive

This paper analyzes the evolution of central bank topics using a corpus of over 20,000 speeches spanning nearly three decades and a range of topic models. We identify thirteen themes, including monetary policy, financial stability, digital payments, and climate-related finance. Examining their development over time, we classify these themes as “evergreens”, “waning threads”, or emergent “rising stars”, and show that early adoption and topic leadership are nearly equally shared between emerging and advanced economies’ central banks. In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, topic focus converged worldwide, with a renewed emphasis on financial stability. Finally, static covariate regressions link topic prevalence to inflation regimes, central bank independence, and speech format, highlighting the impact of macroeconomic and institutional factors on communication priorities.