Economic Reality, Economic Media and Individuals' Expectations

Kristoffer Persson

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between economic media sentiment and individuals' expetations and perceptions about economic conditions. We test if economic media sentiment Granger-causes individuals' expectations and opinions concerning economic conditions, controlling for macroeconomic variables. We develop a measure of economic media sentiment using a supervised machine learning method on a data set of Swedish economic media during the period 1993-2017. We classify the sentiment of 179,846 media items, stemming from 1,071 unique media outlets, and use the number of news items with positive and negative sentiment to construct a time series index of economic media sentiment. Our results show that this index Granger-causes individuals' perception of macroeconomic conditions. This indicates that the way the economic media selects and frames macroeconomic news matters for individuals' aggregate perception of macroeconomic reality.

Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp, nep-cul and nep-mac
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2007.13823

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