How Norges Bank Communicates: A paragraph-level analysis of communicative functions and topics across 80 recent documents

This project presents a descriptive, paragraph-level content analysis of how Norges Bank communicates in its most recent English-language speeches and press releases. The corpus was collected on 4 April 2026 from Norges Bank’s English-language website and includes 40 speeches and 40 press releases, for a total of 80 documents. The paragraph is the unit of analysis, and the public paragraph-level dataset contains 1,622 rows, of which 1,406 paragraphs are included in the analytic sample used for the figures. Each paragraph was coded manually along two dimensions: primary communicative function and primary substantive topic. The function categories capture whether a paragraph is primarily oriented toward economic assessment and diagnosis, policy explanation and justification, outlook and forward guidance, risk and uncertainty, or institutional accountability and mandate. The topic categories capture whether the paragraph primarily concerns inflation and prices, interest rates and monetary stance, economic activity and the labor market, exchange rates and external conditions, or financial stability and banking. The public release does not redistribute the full underlying website text. Because the website text is owned by Norges Bank, the released files contain coded variables, dates, document types, source URLs, identifiers, and related metadata rather than full paragraph or document text. The deposit also includes the data-preparation and figure-generation scripts, a codebook, a short results note, and a PDF presentation summarizing the main descriptive findings. The results show that outlook and forward guidance was the most common communicative function in the corpus, accounting for 36.9 percent of analysed paragraphs, followed by institutional accountability and mandate at 26.6 percent and policy explanation and justification at 20.5 percent. On the topic side, economic activity and the labor market was the most common topic overall at 24.2 percent, followed by exchange rates and external conditions at 22.9 percent and interest rates and monetary stance at 21.9 percent. Taken together, the findings suggest that Norges Bank’s communication in this bounded corpus was oriented more toward future developments, institutional reasoning, and a broad economic narrative than toward inflation alone. These results should be read as descriptive patterns within a bounded corpus of 80 documents, not as evidence of audience effects or wider public influence.