In The Quarterly review of economics and finance : journal of the Midwest Economics Association
We investigate a novel dataset of more than half a million 15 seconds transcribed audio snippets containing COVID-19 mentions from major US TV stations throughout 2020. Using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, we identify seven COVID-19 related topics discussed in US TV news. We find that several topics identified by the LDA predict significant and economically meaningful market reactions in the next day, even after controlling for the general TV tone derived from a field-specific COVID-19 tone dictionary. Our results suggest that COVID-19 related TV content had nonnegligible effects on financial markets during the pandemic.
Möller Rouven, Reichmann Doron
2023-Feb
COVID-19 TV news, Natural language processing, Stock returns, Topic modeling
