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Regional Economic Sentiment: Constructing Quantitative Estimates from the Beige Book and Testing Their Ability to Forecast Recessions

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We use natural language processing methods to quantify the sentiment expressed in the Federal Reserve's anecdotal summaries of current economic conditions in the national and 12 Federal Reserve District-level economies as published eight times per year in the Beige Book since 1970. We document that both national and District-level economic sentiment tend to rise and fall with the US business cycle. But economic sentiment is extremely heterogeneous across Districts, and we find that national economic sentiment is not always the simple aggregation of District-level sentiment. We show that the heterogeneity in District-level economic sentiment can be used, over and above the information contained in national economic sentiment, to better forecast US recessions.

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  • Ilias Filippou & Christian Garciga & James Mitchell & My T. Nguyen, 2024. "Regional Economic Sentiment: Constructing Quantitative Estimates from the Beige Book and Testing Their Ability to Forecast Recessions," Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, vol. 2024(08), pages 1-8, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedcec:98247
    DOI: 10.26509/frbc-ec-202408
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    1. Balke, Nathan S & Petersen, D'Ann, 2002. "How Well Does the Beige Book Reflect Economic Activity? Evaluating Qualitative Information Quantitatively," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 34(1), pages 114-136, February.
    2. Carroll, Christopher D & Fuhrer, Jeffrey C & Wilcox, David W, 1994. "Does Consumer Sentiment Forecast Household Spending? If So, Why?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 84(5), pages 1397-1408, December.
    3. Michael T. Owyang & Jeremy Piger & Howard J. Wall, 2015. "Forecasting National Recessions Using State‐Level Data," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 47(5), pages 847-866, August.
    4. Leif Anders Thorsrud, 2020. "Words are the New Numbers: A Newsy Coincident Index of the Business Cycle," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 38(2), pages 393-409, April.
    5. Souleles, Nicholas S, 2004. "Expectations, Heterogeneous Forecast Errors, and Consumption: Micro Evidence from the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Surveys," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 36(1), pages 39-72, February.
    6. Sadique, Shibley & In, Francis & Veeraraghavan, Madhu & Wachtel, Paul, 2013. "Soft information and economic activity: Evidence from the Beige Book," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 81-92.
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    1. Charles S. Gascon & Joseph Martorana, 2024. "The Beige Book and the Business Cycle: Using Beige Book Anecdotes to Construct Recession Probabilities," Working Papers 2024-037, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, revised 06 Dec 2024.
    2. Joel Elvery, 2024. "Introduction to Cleveland Fed Summary of Regional Conditions and Expectations (SORCE)," Cleveland Fed District Data Brief 99167, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

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