The linguistic style of “Dólar Blue”: exploring the link between public discourse and the parallel exchange rate
Date
2024-10
Authors
Sundblad, Alfonso
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Khalid, Osama
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Universidad de San Andrés. Departamento de Economía
Abstract
This paper explores whether there is a relationship between linguistic patterns in public discourse and the volatility of the Dólar Blue exchange rate in Argentina, using the Spanish version of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). This tool provides a more detailed analysis than the current usual methodologies used by economists for these topics, such as sentiment analysis. We make use of stylometric features — such as function words, emotional tone, cognitive processes, and social references —to capture how economic fluctuations are reflected in both mainstream government and news media discourse style. Our dataset comprises over 400 million words from transcripts and titles of over 50 Argentine YouTube channels between January 1, 2018 and December 31, 2022. We find significant relations between linguistic features and movements in the Dólar Blue, which are not limited to positive and negative emotions, but more complex stylemetric characteristics such as emotional and cognitive dimensions. Our results show that using larger moving average windows yields more significant results overall, suggesting that linguistic adjustments to economic changes are gradual. However, news channels tend to react more and more quickly to exchange rate changes, while government discourse lags, adopting a more formal and conflict-driven tone over time. The present findings mark the first application of Spanish LIWC in economic research, demonstrating its potential as a powerful tool for analyzing the intersection of language and economic variables. Our approach encourages future research to apply LIWC in other contexts and studies, thus including it to economists toolkit.
Description
Fil: Sundblad, Alfonso. Universidad de San Andrés. Departamento de Economía; Argentina.