Central Bank Communication on Financial Stability – A Shadowed Sibling? The Tale of Central Europe

Central bank communication on financial stability has been less studied than on monetary policy. Our paper aims to contribute to the growing literature in this area. Our focus is the region of Central Europe, where financial sectors are intertwined through close cross-border ownership, and about half of the countries are members of the euro area. Using large language models (LLMs) combined with country-specific contextual analysis, we study executive summaries of Financial Stability Reports (FSRs) published since the early 2000s by seven Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European (CESEE) central banks, as well as by Austria and the European Central Bank (ECB). We construct a novel financial stability sentiment index and document that central bank communication is strongly risk-focused, most notably in the case of the ECB. In addition, prior to the Global Financial Crisis, the Austrian central bank was much less concerned than other central banks in the region although Austria plays a pivotal role in the financial system in the region. Our analysis of the link between financial stability sentiment communication and macroprudential policy action highlights that many central banks actively use and communicate about borrower-based measures, while most countries activated non-zero counter-cyclical capital buffers belatedly or not at all. Finally, comparing central banks’ communication on financial stability and monetary policy, we find that euro area national central banks and the ECB’s FSR communicated about the rising risks of post-Covid inflation in a timely manner, ahead of the ECB’s monetary policy communication.