Journal article

Publication year: 2016

Pages: 483-515

Journal: Journal of Economics and Statistics

Volume number: 236

Issue number: 4

ISSN: 0021-4027

eISSN: 2366-049X

DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.1515/jbnst-2015-1026

Publisher: De Gruyter Brill

Abstract: 
Is academic research anticipating economic shake-ups or merely reflecting the past? Exploiting the corpus of articles published in the Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbucher fur Nationalokonomie und Statistik) for the years 1949 to 2010, this pilot study proposes a quantitative framework for addressing these questions. The framework comprises two steps. First, methods from computational linguistics are used to identify relevant topics and their relative importance over time. In particular, Latent Dirichlet Analysis is applied to the corpus after some preparatory work. Second, for some of the topics which are closely related to specific economic indicators, the developments of topic weights and indicator values are confronted in dynamic regression and VAR models. The results indicate that for some topics of interest, the discourse in the journal leads developments in the real economy, while for other topics it is the other way round.

Harvard Citation style: Lüdering, J. and Winker, P. (2016) Forward or Backward Looking? The Economic Discourse and the Observed Reality, Journal of Economics and Statistics, 236(4), pp. 483-515. https://doi.org/10.1515/jbnst-2015-1026

APA Citation style: Lüdering, J., & Winker, P. (2016). Forward or Backward Looking? The Economic Discourse and the Observed Reality. Journal of Economics and Statistics. 236(4), 483-515. https://doi.org/10.1515/jbnst-2015-1026