Hope, Change, and Financial Markets: Can Obama's Words Drive the Market?

Jose Tavares () and Sharmin Sazedj

No 8713, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Barack Obama?s victory in the 2009 presidential elections in the United States is widely credited to his personal charisma and his extraordinary rhetorical powers, as revealed throughout the campaign. President Obama was inaugurated in the midst of the worst economic crisis in the country, when individuals and organizations yearned for leadership and signs of change. We code an array of rhetorical features in Obama´s main speeches and press conferences and assess their impact on stock returns of the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ indices, at 3 and 7 day time horizons. We find that words matter. Paragraphs matter, too. We also uncover how some of Obama´s rhetorical abilities that are politically effective seem to be perceived negatively by economic agents, and have a significant negative impact on stock returns.

Keywords: Financial markets; Political economy; Speech content; Barack obama (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E44 G12 G14 H12 O51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP8713 (application/pdf)

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:cpr:ceprdp:8713

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP8713

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().