Using text from 200 million pages of 13,000 US local newspapers and machine learning methods, we construct a 170-year-long measure of economic sentiment at the country and state levels, that expands existing measures in both the time series (by more than a century) and the cross-section. Our measure...
Keywords:
Business cycle, macroeconomic news, economic sentiment, monetary policy, textual analysis, machine learning, big data, neural networks