Narratives of FinTech
The Political Economy of Disruptive Discourse
Description
Conference slides for a presentation of the working paper Narratives of FinTech: The Political Economy of Disruptive Discourse at the New Political Economy Symposium at the European University Institute. I focused on how central bankers construct and reproduce a shared policy narrative around fintech. Drawing on a dataset of 675 BIS fintech speeches scraped and processed through a workflow combining RSelenium automation, sentence-level tokenization, zero-shot classification and sentiment analysis, I showed that despite institutional and country heterogeneity regulators converge on a circumscribed disruption narrative: one that frames innovation as desirable only within clearly bounded parameters, emphasizes financial stability and efficiency, and maintains a depoliticized epistemic community logic. The presentation walked through the empirical puzzle of thematic homogeneity, the qualitative coding strategy, the classification labels, cross-sectional aggregation, and the regression results linking narrative patterns to political-economy indicators. It was a focused discussion with colleagues working on CBDCs, digital euros, global payments, and the geopolitics of fintech.
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