We propose an approach to measuring the state of the economy via textual analysis of business news. From the full text of 800,000 Wall Street Journal articles for 1984-2017, we estimate a topic model that summarizes business news into interpretable topical themes and quantifies the proportion of...

We find that shocks to the equity capital ratio of financial intermediaries--Primary Dealer counterparties of the New York Federal Reserve--possess significant explanatory power for crosssectional variation in expected returns. This is true not only for commonly studied equity and government...