I’m happy to share that my second working paper (and therefore the second chapter of my PhD thesis!) is now available on this webpage. In the economic expectations literature, it is a well-established fact that there are persistent differences in households‘ inflation expectations. In my paper, I explore the role of mass media as a possible driver of this heterogeneity. I collect German newspaper articles and construct newspaper-specific indicators by extracting their sentiment towards inflation with OpenAI’s large language model, ChatGPT-3.5. In a forecasting exercise, I test if some of the newspapers are more informative for the expectations of specific socioeconomic groups of households. Indeed, indices based on Germany’s most popular tabloid – Die Bild – are performing better in forecasting low-income and less-educated households‘ expectations, while the opposite holds true for the more reputable daily newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Different newspapers, different expectations: My new working paper is out
