IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aejmac/v17y2025i2p285-314.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • 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.

Suggested Citation

  • 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
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/mac.20210226
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.
    File URL: https://doi.org/10.3886/E205441V1
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/materials/22750
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/materials/22751
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1257/mac.20210226?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    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

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aea:aejmac:v:17:y:2025:i:2:p:285-314. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Michael P. Albert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aeaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.