News-based indicators are in vogue in economics. But they tend to be applied with little consideration for the properties of news itself. In this paper, we try to shed light on the nature of this type of data. Drawing from established findings in communication science and journalism studies we...

To counter the effect of recessions on workers, Congress has passed legislation to spur job creation through increased spending on public works (infrastructure) and public service programs, revenue sharing with state governments, and employment tax credits. Although the economic stimulus measure...

News-based indicators are in vogue in economics. But they tend to be applied with little consideration for the properties of news itself. In this paper, we try to shed light on the nature of this type of data. Drawing from established findings in communication science and journalism studies we...

This paper deals with the problem of deriving consistent time-series from newspaper contentbased topic models. In the first part, we recapitulate a few our own failed attempts, in the second one, we show some results using a twin strategy, that we call prototyping and seeding. Given the...

This paper analyzes the performance of the monthly economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index in predicting recessionary regimes of the (quarterly) U.S. GDP. In this regard, the authors apply a mixed-frequency Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MF-MSVAR) model, and compare its in-sample and...

This paper studies the effects of FOMC forward guidance. We begin by using high frequency identification and direct measures of FOMC private information to show that puzzling responses of private sector forecasts to movements in federal funds futures rates on FOMC announcement days can be...

This paper analyzes the performance of the monthly economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index in predicting recessionary regimes of the (quarterly) U.S. GDP. In this regard, the authors apply a mixed-frequency Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MF-MS-VAR) model, and compare its in-sample and...