Narrative fragmentation and the business cycle

Abstract

According to Shiller (2017), economic and financial narratives often emerge as a consequence of their virality, rather than their veracity, and constitute an important, but understudied driver of aggregate fluctuations. Using a unique dataset of newspaper articles over the 1950–2019 period and state-of-the-art methods from natural language processing, we characterize the properties of business cycle narratives. Our main finding is that narratives tend to consolidate around a dominant explanation during expansions and fragment into competing explanations during contractions. We also show that the existence of past reference events is strongly associated with increased narrative consolidation.