Media, The Central Bank, and Their Relationship in the Formation of Monetary Policy

Abstract

In this thesis, we are investigating the connection between the central bank of Norway, Norges Bank, the news, and the economy. We set out with a goal of exploring how these three actors mutually affect each other. We gather data from three major Norwegian news sites, NRK, VG, and Nettavisen in addition to data on inflation, CPI, and the 3 month NIBOR rate. To measure the effect the news has on the different economic indicators, we calculate a semantic score for each article in a selected part of the total col-lection of articles. After that, we use a transformer based model to cluster and extract topics from the text and qualitatively analyse this for any con-nection between the news and the economy. Our results showed some connection between the news reporting on economic-related topics and economic markers, but more research is needed to get a more clear picture.