ECB perception of non-banks: a machine learning-based approach

This paper studies the European Central Bank’s (ECB) perception of non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) and how this perception is publicly communicated. We construct a perception index based on ECB speeches over the period 1998–2025. Sentiment in references to non-banks is classified by a large language model that we fine-tune on our own hand-labeled dataset constructed for this purpose. The resulting index reveals a predominantly negative and declining perception over time, particularly s