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...

Using text from 200 million pages of 13,000 US local newspapers and machine learning methods, we construct a 170-year-long measure of economic sentiment at the country and state levels, that expands existing measures in both the time series (by more than a century) and the cross-section. Our...

This paper provides estimates of the effect of unemployment insurance benefits on labor supply outcomes over the business cycle using 20 years of administrative claims and earnings data from California. A regression kink design exploiting nonlinear benefit schedules provides experimental...

On the basis of keyword searches in newspaper articles, several versions of the Recession-Word Index (RWI) are constructed for Germany and Switzerland. We use these indices in order to track the business cycle dynamics in these two countries. Our main findings are the following. First, we show...