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Registrations close on Friday 30 May at 4pm. If you would like to register after this date, please contact us at kbseventsteam@kcl.ac.uk
ECONDAT 2025 spring meeting: Economics with nontraditional data and analytical tools
About the conference
Date: 5 and 6 June 2025
Locations: King’s College London, London
The current boom in generative artificial intelligence (gen-AI), the availability of large novel data sources, and advances in computational modelling techniques bring fresh opportunities to address key challenges in economic research. Specifically, the rapid progress of gen-AI brings questions to both sides of economists’ desks: (1) how can these tools transform our own analysis, but also (2) how will they transform the subject of our studies, the economy?
This conference brings together researchers, practitioners, and decision makers from diverse backgrounds to discuss these big questions. This is the latest in a series of events jointly organised by the Bank of England (BoE), the European Central Bank (ECB), the Data Analytics for Finance and Macro Research Centre (DAFM) at King’s College London (KCL), and the Central Bank Research Association (CEBRA).
The ECONDAT Program consolidates wider efforts by multiple central banks and international organisations to create a community of researchers across a diverse set of fields (economics, finance, data science, statistics, computer science) and academic and public institutions. The program organises regular conferences on nontraditional data and analytical methods to foster an environment that will spur cutting-edge research for the development of tools which are ultimately used for better decision making.
The keynote address will be given by Ines Montani, creator and entrepreneur in the NLP and AI world, co-founder, and CEO of Explosion. The event will cover topics along the lines of, but not limited to, the following:
- the use of gen-AI, and the implications of its adoption for the economy
- learning or computational agent-based models in economics or finance
- the use of machine learning or natural language processing for economic analysis with a focus on macroeconomics, financial stability, prudential regulation, and central bank communications
- the use of large, granular, structured, or unstructured data sources to predict or understand economic agents from a novel perspective.
Day 1
| 8:15 - 8:45 |
Registration and Coffee |
| 8:45 - 9:00 |
Opening remarks - Megan Greene (External member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England) |
| 9:00 - 10:30 |
Session 1: Central Bank Communication Chair: Dimitrios Kanelis (Deutsche Bundesbank) The Emotions of Monetary Policy Sinem Kandemir (European Central Bank) Discussant: Maximillan Freier (European Central Bank) The Financial Instability - Monetary Policy Nexus: Evidence from the FOMC Minutes Dimitrios Kanelis (Deutsche Bundesbank) Discussant: Eric Tong (Bank of England) |
| 10:30 - 11:00 |
Coffee Break |
| 11:00 - 12:30 |
Session 2: News Chair: Taejin Park (Bank for International Settlements) Prices at Prime Time: How TV News Shape Inflation Attention in Germany Moritz Grebe (Justus Liebig University Giessen) Discussant: Andreas Joseph (Bank of England) Harnessing artificial intelligence for monitoring financial markets Taejin Park (Bank for International Settlements) Discussant: Livia Paranhos (Bank of England) |
| 12:30 - 13:30 |
Lunch |
| 13:30 - 14:30 |
Keynote - Ines Montani (Co-founder and CEO of Explosion) Discussant: James Brookes (Bank of England) |
| 14:30 - 16:00 |
Session 3: Solution methods for Macro Modeling Chair: Fabio Stohler (University of Bonn) A Global Solution Method for HACT Models with Aggregate Risk Niklas Bonnmann (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Discussant: Daniel Albuquerque (Bank of England) Generative Economic Modeling Fabio Stohler (University of Bonn) Discussant: Jamie Lenney (Bank of England) |
| 16:00 - 16:30 |
Coffee Break |
| 16:30 - 18:00 |
Session 4: LLMs for Economic Modelling Chair: Josef Sveda (Bank for International Settlements) Simulating the Survey of Professional Forecasters Sophia Kazinnik (Stanford University) Discussant: Dragos Gorduza (Bank of England) The rise of generative AI: modelling exposure, substitution, and inequality effects on the US labour market Josef Sveda (Bank for International Settlements) Discussant: Maria Balgova (Bank of England) |
|
18:00 |
Conference BBQ and poster session Posters From Minutes to Insights: Prudential, Monetary Policy, and Governance Analysis of UK Bank Boards Dragos Gorduza Word2Prices: embedding central bank communications for inflation prediction Fabio Albert Comazzi Interest Rate Risk Hedging and The Cost of Debt: Novel Evidence from a Large Language Model Alessio Venturini Prices at Prime Time: How TV News Shape Inflation Attention in Germany Moritz Grebe Introducing Textual Measures of Central Bank Policy-Linkages Using ChatGPT Maximilian Freier Monetary Metanomics: The Effect of Monetary Policy on Virtual Real Estate Prices Salah Hassanin Assessing Generative AI value in a public sector context: evidence from a field experiment Seamus Kelly Monetary Policy, Ambiguity and Liquidity: Evidence from the European Repo Market Poramapa Poonpakdee
Exhibitors Dragos Cozma and Sam Speller, Office for National Statistics (ONS) Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) Luigi Longo and Konstantin Boss, European Commission – Joint Research Centre (EC-JRC) |
Day 2
| 8:30 – 9:00 |
Registration and Coffee |
| 9:00 - 10:30 |
Session 5: Natural Language Processing in Economics Chair: Michael McMahon (University of Oxford) The Meaning of Text: Benchmarking NLP Approaches for Central Banking Moritz Pfeifer (Institute of Economic Policy) Discussant: Ana Galvao (Bloomberg) EcoFinBench - A Natural Language Processing Benchmark for Economics and Finance Michael McMahon (University of Oxford) Discussant: Yulan He (King's College London) |
| 10:30 - 11:00 |
Coffee Break |
| 11:00 - 12:30 |
Session 6: Innovations in Data Analysis Chair: Marcus Buckmann (Bank of England) Assessing Subjective Probabilistic Expectations in Household Surveys with Audio Records Nico Forteza (Banco de España) Discussant: Salah Hassanin (Justus Liebig University Giessen) Revealing economic facts: LLMs know more than they say Marcus Buckmann (Bank of England) Discussant: Aleksandr Mattal (CTO at London Reporting House) |
| 12:30 - 13:30 |
Lunch |
| 13:30 – 15:00 |
Session 7: Econometric Methods Chair: Sylvain Barde (University of Kent) Nonlinearities and Heterogeneity in Firms Response to Aggregate Fluctuations: What Can We Learn From Machine Learning? Simone Pesce (Central Bank of Ireland) Discussant: Daniele Massacci (King's College) Bayesian estimation of a large-scale macroeconomic policy agent-based model Sylvain Barde (University of Kent) Discussant: David Van Dijcke (University of Michigan) |
| 15:00 – 15:15 |
Closing Remarks - Yannis Stournaras (Governor of the Central Bank of Greece) |
Event details
8th FloorBush House
Strand campus, 30 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4BG