News Sentiment and Cross-Country Fluctuations

Abstract

What is the information content of news-based measures of sentiment? How are they related to economic fluctuations? I construct a sentiment index by measuring the net amount of positive expressions in the full corpus of Economic news articles produced by Reuters covering 12 countries over the period 1987-2013. The index successfully tracks fluctuations in GDP at the country level, is a leading indicator of GDP growth and contains information on future GDP growth which is not captured by consensus forecasts. This suggests that forecasters do not appropriately incorporate available information in predicting future states of the economy.

Keywords: Sentiment, News Analysis, Behavioral Macroeconomics and Finance

JEL Classification: E03, F37, D8