Do daily lead texts help nowcasting GDP growth?

Marc Burri

No 23-02, IRENE Working Papers from IRENE Institute of Economic Research

Abstract: This paper evaluates whether publicly available daily news lead texts help nowcasting Swiss GDP growth. I collect titles and lead texts from three Swiss newspapers and calculate text-based indicators for various economic concepts. A composite indicator calculated from these indicators is highly correlated with low-frequency macroeconomic data and survey-based indicators. In a pseudo out-of-sample nowcasting exercise for Swiss GDP growth, the indicator outperforms a monthly Swiss business cycle indicator if one month of information is available. Improvements in nowcasting accuracy mainly occur in times of economic distress.

Keywords: Mixed-frequency data; composite leading indicator; news sentiment; recession; natural language processing; nowcasting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C53 E32 E37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages.
Date: 2023-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:irn:wpaper:23-02

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