Min(d)ing the President: A Text Analytic Approach to Measuring Tax News

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lieb, Lenard; Jassem, Adam; Almeida, Rui jorge; Bastuerk, Nalan; Smeekes, Stephan
• 署名单位: Maastricht University
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MACROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7707
• DOI: 10.1257/mac.20210226
• 发表日期: 2025
• 页码: 285-314
• 关键词: identification; noise

摘要

Economic agents react to signals about future tax policy changes. Consequently, estimating their macroeconomic effects requires identification of such signals. We propose a novel text analytic approach for transforming textual information into an economically meaningful time series. Using this method, we create a tax news measure from all publicly available postwar communications of US presidents. Our measure predicts the direction and size of future tax changes and contains signals not present in previously considered (narrative) measures of tax changes. We investigate the effects of tax news and find that, for long anticipation horizons, pre-implementation effects lead initially to contractions in output. (JEL D72, D82, E62, H20, H30)