Forward or Backward Looking? The Economic Discourse and the Observed Reality

Jochen Lüdering and Peter Winker

Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), 2016, vol. 236, issue 4, 483-515

Abstract: Is academic research anticipating economic shake-ups or merely reflecting the past? Exploiting the corpus of articles published in the Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik) for the years 1949 to 2010, this pilot study proposes a quantitative framework for addressing these questions. The framework comprises two steps. First, methods from computational linguistics are used to identify relevant topics and their relative importance over time. In particular, Latent Dirichlet Analysis is applied to the corpus after some preparatory work. Second, for some of the topics which are closely related to specific economic indicators, the developments of topic weights and indicator values are confronted in dynamic regression and VAR models. The results indicate that for some topics of interest, the discourse in the journal leads developments in the real economy, while for other topics it is the other way round.

Keywords: automatic text analysis; economic history; latent dirichlet allocation; time series analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B23 C22 C49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Journal Article: Forward or Backward Looking? The Economic Discourse and the Observed Reality (2016)
Journal Article: Forward or Backward Looking? The Economic Discourse and the Observed Reality (2016)
Working Paper: Forward or Backward Looking? The Economic Discourse and the Observed Reality (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jns:jbstat:v:236:y:2016:i:4:p:483-515

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