The paper employs a spike-and-slab technique to select Google Trends categories into an augmented autoregressive model to nowcast Sri Lanka’s consumer confidence. The paper then examines the benefits of incorporating Google Trends data in predicting consumer confidence in Sri Lanka: i....

Consumer confidence indicators(CCI) serve as a veritable tool for providing useful information to policy makers, forecasters and the general public. Recent studies indicated the possibility of a slowdown in output, resulting from the pessimism of consumers in their expectations about the general...

We construct sentiment indices for 20 countries from 1980 to 2019. Relying on computational text analysis, we capture specific language like 'fear', 'risk', 'hedging', 'opinion', and, 'crisis', as well as 'positive' and 'negative' sentiments, in news articles from the Financial Times. We assess...

The COVID-19 pandemic and induced economic and social constraints have significantly impacted the confidence of both consumers and businesses. Despite that, comprehensive studies of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the consumer and business sentiment are still lacking. Thus, in our...

The availability of copious amounts of data produced by the increasing datification of our society is nowadays deemed an opportunity to produce timely and convenient statistical information. This paper shows the building of economic sentiment indexes from the texts of the most read economic...