New News is Bad News

Abstract

An increase in the novelty of news predicts negative stock market returns and negative macroeconomic outcomes over the next year. We quantify news novelty – changes in the distribution of news text – through an entropy measure, calculated using a recurrent neural network applied to a large news corpus. Entropy is a better out-of-sample predictor of market returns than a collection of standard measures. Cross-sectional entropy exposure carries a negative risk premium, suggesting that assets that positively covary with entropy hedge the aggregate risk associated with shifting news language. Entropy risk cannot be explained by existing long-short factors.

Keywords: entropy; natural language processing; news articles; empirical asset pricing

JEL Classification: E30, G12, G14, G17