A0842
Title: Consumer confidence media indexation
Authors: Andres Algaba - Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) [presenting]
Kris Boudt - Vrije Universiteit Brussel and VU Amsterdam (Belgium)
Samuel Borms - Universite de Neuchatel (Switzerland)
Abstract: The consumer confidence index is an important (leading) economic indicator in Belgium. Currently, it is measured by the National Bank of Belgium via a monthly survey. We argue that this survey method can be improved with the qualitative information embedded in news media articles. By using a standard lexicon approach, we extract daily sentiment scores from news articles of the national Belgian press agency. We then use these daily sentiment scores and monthly observations on the consumer confidence index in a mixed-frequency state space framework to provide nowcasts of consumer confidence index.
