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Min(d)ing the President: A text analytic approach to measuring tax news

Lenard Lieb, Adam Jassem, Rui Jorge Almeida, Nalan Baştürk, Stephan Smeekes

arXiv 7 Apr 2021 · Econometrics · publishedAmerican Economic Journal Macroeconomics (2025) · 3 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2104.03261 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Economic agents react to signals about future tax policy changes. Consequently, estimating their macroeconomic effects requires identification of such signals. We propose a novel text analytic approach for transforming textual information into an economically meaningful time series. Using this method, we create a tax news measure from all publicly available post-war communications of U.S. presidents. Our measure predicts the direction and size of future tax changes and contains signals not present in previously considered (narrative) measures of tax changes. We investigate the effects of tax news and find that, for long anticipation horizons, pre-implementation effects lead initially to contractions in output.

Citation extraction

52
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110
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appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 59% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Mertens, K. and M. O. Ravn (2012) Empirical evidence on the aggregate effects of anticipated and unanticipated US tax policy shocks0.9568388%
2Romer, C. D. and D. H. Romer (2010) The macroeconomic effects of tax changes: Estimates based on a new measure of fiscal shocks0.9416583%
3Yang, S.-C. S (2007) A chronology of postwar US federal income tax policy0.9209678%
4Mertens, K. and M. O. Ravn (2014) A reconciliation of SVAR and narrative estimates of tax multipliers0.8434375%
5Ramey, V. A (2011) Identifying government spending shocks: It's all in the timing0.7373367%
6Blei, D. M., A. Y. Ng, and M. I. Jordan (2003) Latent Dirichlet Allocation0.7373367%
7Leeper, E. M., A. W. Richter, and T. B. Walker (2012) Quantitative effects of fiscal foresight0.7218438%
8Romer, C. D. and D. H. Romer (2009) A narrative analysis of postwar tax changes0.6936533%
9Stock, J. H. and M. W. Watson (2018) Identification and estimation of dynamic causal effects in macroeconomics using external instruments0.64422100%
10Hecq, A., L. Margaritella, and S. Smeekes (2023) Granger causality testing in high-dimensional vars: a post-double-selection procedure0.5112250%

Showing the top 10 of 52 scored citations.