Measuring social unrest using media reports

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Barrett, Philip; Appendino, Maximiliano; Nguyen, Kate; Miranda, Jorge de Leon
• 署名单位: International Monetary Fund; International Monetary Fund; INSEAD Business School; Inter-American Development Bank
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3878
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2022.102924
• 发表日期: 2022
• 关键词: Social unrest; Media coverage

摘要

We present a new index of social unrest based on counts of relevant media reports, covering 130 countries monthly starting in 1986. Spikes in the index identify major events, which match event timelines from external sources for four major regional waves of social unrest. We assess our index against others and show it performs as well as the next best alternative but with superior coverage. Social unrest is associated with a 3 percentage point increase in the frequency of social unrest domestically and a 1 percent increase in neighbors in the next six months. Despite this, social unrest is not a better predictor of future social unrest than the country average rate. We investigate economic performance around unrest events, showing that (1) macroeconomic performance is not robustly correlated with subsequent unrest and (2) after unrest events, positive output surprises are smaller but negative ones unchanged.