Sharks and minnows in a shoal of words: Measuring latent ideological positions of German economic research institutes based on text mining techniques

Sami Diaf, Jörg Döpke, Ulrich Fritsche and Ida Rockenbach

No 24, Working Papers from German Research Foundation's Priority Programme 1859 "Experience and Expectation. Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour", Humboldt University Berlin

Abstract: Using corpora of business cycle report sections dealing with monetary and fiscal policy issues from 1999 to 2017 and using methods of unsupervised text scaling (Slapin and Proksch, 2008; Lauderdale and Herzog, 2016), namely Wordfish and Wordshoal we scale the institutions' theoretical/ideological position over debates. The results are in line with the findings from descriptive textual analysis. For monetary policy, we observe a strong but short-lived consensus in debate-specific positions at the height of the financial crisis in 2008 and a larger polarization after 2008 compared to the sample period before. For the fiscal policy textual corpus, the polarization was similarly high before and after the crisis. For both policy areas, the institutions DIW Berlin and IfW Kiel define the outer bounds of the observed spectrum of latent ideological positions.

Keywords: Text Scaling Model; Wordfish; Wordshoal; Computational Content Analysis; Hierarchical Factor Model; Bayesian Estimation; Political Economy; Ideology; Polarization; Public Policy; Monetary Policy; Fiscal Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C55 D7 E32 E52 E62 H3 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-pol
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Working Paper: Sharks and minnows in a shoal of words: Measuring latent ideological positions of German economic research institutes based on text mining techniques (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:pp1859:24

DOI: 10.18452/22015

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