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Min(d)ing the President: A Text Analytic Approach to Measuring Tax News

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

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 postwar communications of US 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.

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  • Lenard Lieb & Adam Jassem & Rui Jorge Almeida & Nalan Baştürk & Stephan Smeekes, 2025. "Min(d)ing the President: A Text Analytic Approach to Measuring Tax News," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 17(2), pages 285-314, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:aea:aejmac:v:17:y:2025:i:2:p:285-314
    DOI: 10.1257/mac.20210226
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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy; Modern Monetary Theory
    • H20 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - General
    • H30 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - General

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