Can we use newspaper articles to forecast economic activity? Our answer is yes and, to this end, we propose a brand new economic dictionary in Italian with valence shifters, and we apply it to a corpus of about two million articles from four popular newspapers. We produce a set of high-frequency...

Covid-19 caused an abrupt disruption in the world economy and posed big challenges to macroeconomic and time-series analysis. The deep trough in the business cycle was unprecedented in momentum and magnitude, was not approached smoothly, and the pandemic shock was not heralded by any warning...