The Journal of Finance

The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of finance. It is one of the most widely cited journals in academic finance, and in all of economics. Each of the six issues per year reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world. The journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.

AFA members can log in to view full-text articles below.

View past issues


Search the Journal of Finance:






Search results: 1.

Business News and Business Cycles

Published: 08/09/2024   |   DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13377

LELAND BYBEE, BRYAN KELLY, ASAF MANELA, DACHENG XIU

We propose an approach to measuring the state of the economy via textual analysis of business news. From the full text of 800,000 Wall Street Journal articles for 1984 to 2017, we estimate a topic model that summarizes business news into interpretable topical themes and quantifies the proportion of news attention allocated to each theme over time. News attention closely tracks a wide range of economic activities and can forecast aggregate stock market returns. A text‐augmented vector autoregression demonstrates the large incremental role of news text in forecasting macroeconomic dynamics. We retrieve the narratives that underlie these improvements in market and business cycle forecasts.