Suggested only a few years ago, green central banking has received a new impetus with the central bank interventions implemented in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several central banks, with the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) being prominent examples, have stepped up their public communication on this issue in an effort to explain and justify their planned or ongoing policy actions. Carefully recorded and easy to find, these public communication messages are a rich source of insight into the process of monetary policy formation. In this article, we analyze the messages from two central banks, with the primary objective of identifying the narratives they use (if any) and describing the key features of these narratives, thus shedding new light on an ongoing process of policy change. A secondary objective of the article is to contribute to the growing literature related to the use of narratives in public policy by studying narratives in monetary policy through qualitative means, an approach that, to date, has received relatively little attention from scholars. To this end, we discuss two expectations related to the use of policy narratives derived from the literature. Thus, we hope to show how the two central banks devise and deploy narratives to help implement an unprecedented turnaround in monetary policy.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, society has increasingly relied on alternative ways to procure goods, leading to an e-commerce boom. This study analyzes the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that are active in e-commerce in Romania and provides recommendations for entrepreneurs to improve their efficiency. Through unsupervised learning techniques, three classes are identified according to company performance: (1) a class of high-performing companies whose entrepreneurs took the risk of investing in the business, (2) a class of medium-performing companies that maintained their position in the market and (3) a class of financially weak companies whose managers adopted risk-averse, defensive policies. Furthermore, we present scenarios for moving companies from a lower-performing class to a higher-performing class. The research identifies the strategies that managers need to adopt in order to stimulate the activity of e-commerce companies, provides foreign investors a rubric for making investment decisions, and offers a starting point for an entrepreneurship course in academia.