òòò½Íø Journal:
Macroeconomics
ISSN 1945-7707 (Print) | ISSN 1945-7715 (Online)
Min(d)ing the President: A Text Analytic Approach to Measuring Tax News
òòò½Íø Journal: Macroeconomics
vol. 17,
no. 2, April 2025
(pp. 285–314)
Abstract
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.Citation
Lieb, Lenard, Adam Jassem, Rui Jorge Almeida, Nalan BaÅŸtürk, and Stephan Smeekes. 2025. "Min(d)ing the President: A Text Analytic Approach to Measuring Tax News." òòò½Íø Journal: Macroeconomics 17 (2): 285–314. DOI: 10.1257/mac.20210226Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
- D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
- E62 Fiscal Policy
- H20 Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue: General
- H30 Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents: General