Economists in the 2008 Financial Crisis: Slow to See, Fast to Act

Daniel Levy (), Tamir Mayer and Alon Raviv

No 2022-01, Working Papers from Bar-Ilan University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We study the economics and finance scholars’ reaction to the 2008 financial crisis using machine learning language analyses methods of Latent Dirichlet Allocation and dynamic topic modelling algorithms, to analyze the texts of 14,270 NBER working papers covering the 1999–2016 period. We find that academic scholars as a group were insufficiently engaged in crises’ studies before 2008. As the crisis unraveled, however, they switched their focus to studying the crisis, its causes, and consequences. Thus, the scholars were “slow-to-see,” but they were “fast-to-act.” Their initial response to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis is consistent with these conclusions.

Keywords: Financial crisis; Economic Crisis; Great recession; NBER working papers; LDA textual analysis; Topic modeling; Dynamic Topic Modeling; Machine learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E32 E44 E50 F30 G01 G20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 89 pages
Date: 2022-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cwa and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Economists in the 2008 financial crisis: Slow to see, fast to act (2022)
Journal Article: Economists in the 2008 Financial Crisis: Slow to See, Fast to Act (2022)
Working Paper: Economists in the 2008 Financial Crisis: Slow to See, Fast to Act (2022)
Working Paper: Economists in the 2008 Financial Crisis: Slow to See, Fast to Act (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:biu:wpaper:2022-01

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