Nowcasting economic activity in Argentina using newspaper articles
Date
2024-03
Authors
Romero, Juan Pablo
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Aromí, José Daniel
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Universidad de San Andrés. Departamento de Economía
Abstract
This paper explores leveraging unstructured textual data from Argentinian newspapers to
nowcast the monthly Economic Activity Estimator (EMAE) of Argentina. Various economic
uncertainty indexes are constructed by applying natural language processing techniques on
local newspaper articles. The association between these indexes and the EMAE is analyzed
through correlation analysis, Granger causality tests, and out-of-sample nowcasting exercises.
The results suggest that the proposed indexes exhibit predictive value for nowcasting the
EMAE across diverse data splits. While limitations exist regarding generalization across
economic cycles, this study contributes in the viability of extracting valuable signals from
news content to gain timely insights into economic trends, and highlights the potential
for nowcasting key indicators from unstructured data as text mining capabilities and data
availability continue expanding.
Description
Fil: Romero, Juan Pablo. Universidad de San Andrés. Departamento de Economía; Argentina.