ECB's Coeure: Our models proved at times inadequate to support decision-making process

Key quotes from the speech by Benoît Cœuré, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the conference on “Economic and Financial Regulation in the Era of Big Data”, organized by the Banque de France, Paris, 24 November 2017.

Both traditional statistical datasets and our models proved at times inadequate to support the decision-making process, reflecting long time lags, linear assumptions and the absence of more granular information.

These events increasingly boosted the efforts in policy circles to obtain timelier and richer data for policy analysis, in short big data.

Central banks have made considerable progress in recent years in integrating big new datasets into their policy analysis and decision-making.

It is probably fair to say that we are still exploring how to use much of the big data that new technology opens up to us. 

The potential of such data to enrich central bank analysis in the future is considerable, however, as are the challenges that come along with it.