Do daily lead texts help nowcasting GDP growth?

Arbeitspapier

This paper evaluates whether publicly available daily news lead texts help nowcasting Swiss GDP growth. I collect titles and lead texts from three Swiss newspapers and calculate text-based indicators for various economic concepts. A composite indicator calculated from these indicators is highly correlated with low-frequency macroeconomic data and survey-based indicators. In a pseudo out-of-sample nowcasting exercise for Swiss GDP growth, the indicator outperforms a monthly Swiss business cycle indicator if one month of information is available. Improvements in nowcasting accuracy mainly occur in times of economic distress.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IRENE Working Paper ; No. 23-02

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Forecasting Models; Simulation Methods ; Business Fluctuations; Cycles ; Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles: Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications
• Subject: Mixed-frequency data ; composite leading indicator ; news sentiment ; recession ; natural language processing ; nowcasting

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Burri, Marc
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): University of Neuchâtel, Institute of Economic Research (IRENE)
• (where): Neuchâtel
• (when): 2023

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/278605
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET