 Facial expressions and the business cycleJ. Daniel Aromi and Adam Clements Economic Modelling, 2021, vol. 102, issue C Abstract: This paper is the first to consider the link between information in the facial expressions of economic actors and economic activity. While much research has focused on text based sentiment, little is understood about the possible information conveyed by facial expressions. A collection of media photographs corresponding to the US economy for the period 1996–2018 is used to construct indices of emotions communicated by facial expressions. The indices are correlated with business cycle conditions, and also contain information about the future state of the business cycle, information that is incremental to that contained in commonly used measures of economic conditions. Social cognition means that emotions transmitted via facial expressions can influence expectations regarding economic prospects, decision making and hence future economic outcomes. The results here open up the possibility of using information from facial expressions to augment existing methods for using text-based sentiment for macroeconomic or financial forecasting. Keywords: Emotions; Facial expressions; Economic growth; Business cycle (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:102:y:2021:i:c:s0264999321001528 DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2021.105563 Access Statistics for this article Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier |
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