Textual Analysis in Finance

Tim Loughran and Bill McDonald

Annual Review of Financial Economics, 2020, vol. 12, issue 1, 357-375

Abstract: Textual analysis, implemented at scale, has become an important addition to the methodological toolbox of finance. In this review, given the proliferation of papers now using this method, we first provide an updated survey of the literature while focusing on a few broad topics—social media, political bias, and detecting fraud. We do not attempt to survey the various statistical methods and instead initially focus on the construction and use of lexicons in finance. We then center the discussion on readability as an attribute frequently incorporated in contemporaneous research, arguing that its use begs the question of what we are measuring. Finally, we discuss how the literature might build on the intent of measuring readability to measure something more appropriate and more broadly relevant—complexity.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-financial-012820-032249
Full text downloads are only available to subscribers. Visit the abstract page for more information.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:anr:refeco:v:12:y:2020:p:357-375

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.annualreviews.org/action/ecommerce

DOI: 10.1146/annurev-financial-012820-032249

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Annual Review of Financial Economics from Annual Reviews Annual Reviews 4139 El Camino Way Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by http://www.annualreviews.org ().