Distilling the Macroeconomic News Flow
47 Pages Posted: 16 Nov 2013 Last revised: 12 Mar 2023
There are 3 versions of this paper
Distilling the Macroeconomic News Flow
Distilling the Macroeconomic News Flow
Distilling the Macroeconomic News Flow
Date Written: November 2013
Abstract
We propose a simple cross-sectional technique to extract daily factors from economic news released at different times and frequencies. Our approach can effectively handle the large number of different announcements that are relevant for tracking current economic conditions. We apply the technique to extract real-time measures of inflation, output, employment, and macroeconomic sentiment, as well as corresponding measures of disagreement among economists about these indices. We find that our procedure provides more timely and accurate forecasts of future changes in economic conditions than other real-time forecasting approaches.
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