The Macroeconomic Effects of Fiscal Policy: Evidence from Computational Text Analysis of the Debates in the Bundestag

标准宏观经济模型表明，财政政策，即政府支出和税收，是经济活动的重要驱动力。然而，从经验上看，财政政策对经济的影响的规模和迹象仍存在争议。这个项目的目的是提高我们对德国财政政策效果的了解。我们回顾了财政政策制定的根源，即议会程序。我们分别使用了关于议会演讲和报纸报道的两个新的数据集，并应用了计算文本分析的方法，据我们所知，这些方法以前从未被用来研究财政政策。这使我们能够改进对财政政策冲动的衡量和识别。我们利用了一个大型数据库，其中包含了自1949年9月9日以来德国联邦议院的数字化演讲。我们用《法兰克福汇报》数字化档案中的报纸数据来补充这些议会数据，以报道公众对财政政策的辩论。基于多个关键词，我们将获得22万篇关于德国财政政策的文章。我们是第一个使用这些数据来分析财政政策的。该项目结合了对前面提到的数据集的现代计算文本分析与财政政策的宏观经济后果分析。这使我们能够在(I)议会财政政策辩论的基调和(Ii)报纸报道中表达的关于政策的分歧的程度上发现一系列意想不到的变化。我们将估计这两次冲击对收入、就业、消费和投资等商业周期变量的影响。

Standard macroeconomic models suggest that fiscal policy, i.e. government spending and taxation, is an important driver of economic activity. Empirically, however, both the size and the sign of the effect of fiscal policy on the economy remain controversial. The aim of this project is to improve our knowledge about the effects of fiscal policy in Germany. We revisit the roots of fiscal policy-making, i.e. the parliamentary process. We use two novel data sets on parliamentary speeches and newspaper reporting, respectively, and apply methods from computational text analysis which – to the best of our knowledge - have not been used to study fiscal policy before. This allows us to improve the measurement and the identification of fiscal policy impulses. We exploit a large data set that contains the digitized speeches in the German Bundestag since September 9th, 1949. We augment this parliamentary data with newspaper data from the digitized archive of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to cover the public debate about fiscal policy. Based on a number of keywords, we will obtain 220,000 articles on German fiscal policy. We are the first to use this data for an analysis of fiscal policy.The project combines the application of modern computational text analysis to the data set mentioned before with an analysis of the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal policy. This allows us to identify a series of unexpected changes in (i) the tone of the parliamentary debate of fiscal policy and (ii) the extent of disagreement about policy expressed in newspaper reporting. We will estimate the effect of both shocks on business cycle variables such as income, employment, consumption and investment.