Assessing economic sentiment with newspaper text indices: evidence from Switzerland

November 30, 2023
Issue 2023-07

Download file now

The file can be downloaded with the button below.

Abstract

In this study, the signals of more than 530,000 news articles from 15 large Swiss newspapers are extracted to measure the economic sentiment in Switzerland. Economic sentiment includes consumer sentiment and sentiment about businesses as well. The research period for the text sentiment analysis ranges from 2016 until 2022 and, thus, the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown period is included in this analysis. I contribute two new indices: one concerns the measure of news sentiment in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and the other concerns the measure of news sentiment in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The two indices show strong comovement; however, the sentiment in these two language regions is not identical. The indices are available and updatable in real time. The news articles, in contrast to macroeconomic variables such as GDP estimates, are not revised, making these text-based indices an interesting source of information for economic forecasters, especially in times of market turmoil.

Issue:
07
Pages:
82
JEL classification:
C53, C55, E21, E27, E37
Keywords:
Economic sentiment, Sentiment analysis, Text-based Indicator
Year:
2023

Additional files

Related content

Author(s)

  • Marie-Catherine Bieri

Your settings

Required: These cookies (e.g. for storing your IP address) cannot be rejected as they are necessary to ensure the operation of the website. These data are not evaluated further.
Analytics: If you consent to this category, data such as IP address, location, device information, browser version and site visitor behaviour will be collected. These data are evaluated for the SNB's internal purposes and are kept for two years.
Third-party: If you consent to this category, third-party services (used, for example, to add social multimedia content to the SNB's website) will be activated which collect personal data, process these data, disclose them abroad - worldwide - and place cookies. The relevant data protection regulations are linked in the 'Privacy statement for the website of the Swiss National Bank'.

Choose your preferred settings:

This website uses cookies, analytics tools and other technologies to provide requested features, content and services, to personalise the content shown, to provide links to social media, and to analyse the use of the website in anonymised form for the purposes of improving usability. Personal data are also disclosed abroad - worldwide - to video service providers and the analytics tools of these providers are used. More information is available under 'Manage settings'.