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Narratives in economics

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  • Michael Roos
  • Matthias Reccius

Abstract

There is growing awareness within the economics profession of the important role narratives play in the economy. Even though empirical approaches that try to quantify economic narratives are getting increasingly popular, there is no theory or even a universally accepted definition of economic narratives underlying this research. First, we review and categorize the economic literature concerned with narratives and work out the different paradigms that are at play. Only a subset of the literature considers narratives to be active drivers of economic activity. In order to solidify the foundation of narrative economics, we propose a definition of collective economic narratives, isolating five important characteristics. We argue that, for a narrative to be economically relevant, it must be a sense-making story that emerges in a social context and suggests action to a social group. We also systematize how a collective economic narrative differs from a topic and from other kinds of narratives that are likely to have less impact on the economy. With regard to the popular use of topic modeling as an empirical strategy, we suggest that the complementary use of other canonical methods from the natural language processing toolkit and the development of new methods is inevitable to go beyond identifying topics and be able to move towards true empirical narrative economics.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Roos & Matthias Reccius, 2021. "Narratives in economics," Papers 2109.02331, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2022.
  • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2109.02331
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    2. Müller, Henrik & Rieger, Jonas & Schmidt, Tobias & Hornig, Nico, 2022. "Pressure is high - and rising: The Inflation Perception Indicator (IPI) to 30 April 2022 - a research note analysis," DoCMA Working Papers 10, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund Center for Data-based Media Analysis (DoCMA).
    3. Lange, Kai-Robin & Reccius, Matthias & Schmidt, Tobias & Müller, Henrik & Roos, Michael W. M. & Jentsch, Carsten, 2022. "Towards extracting collective economic narratives from texts," Ruhr Economic Papers 963, RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen.

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