Forecasting GDP in Europe with Textual Data
Luca Barbaglia Sergio Consoli Sebastiano Manzan
We evaluate the informational content of news-based sentiment indicators for
forecasting Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and other macroeconomic variables of
the five major European economies. Our data set includes over 27 million
articles for 26 major newspapers in 5 different languages. The evidence
indicates that these sentiment indicators are significant predictors to
forecast macroeconomic variables and their predictive content is robust to
controlling for other indicators available to forecasters in real-time.