Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/245951 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
DEP (Socioeconomics) Discussion Papers - Macroeconomics and Finance Series No. 1/2020
Publisher: 
Hamburg University, Department Socioeconomics, Hamburg
Abstract: 
Using corpora of business cycle report sections dealing with monetary and fiscal policy issues from 1999 to 2017 and using methods of unsupervised text scaling (Slapin and Proksch, 2008; Lauderdale and Herzog, 2016), namely Wordfish and Wordshoal we scale the institutions' theoretical/ideological position over debates. The results are in line with the findings from descriptive textual analysis. For monetary policy, we observe a strong but short-lived consensus in debate-specific positions at the height of the financial crisis in 2008 and a larger polarization after 2008 compared to the sample period before. For the fiscal policy textual corpus, the polarization was similarly high before and after the crisis. For both policy areas, the institutions DIW Berlin and IfW Kiel define the outer bounds of the observed spectrum of latent ideological positions.
Subjects: 
Text Scaling Model
Word fish
Wordshoal
Computational Content Analysis
Hierarchical Factor Model
Bayesian Estimation
Political Economy
Ideology
Polarization
Public Policy
Monetary Policy
Fiscal Policy
JEL: 
E32
E52
E62
H3
C55
D7
P16
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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