What can newspaper articles reveal about the euro area economy?

This study introduces a novel approach to dictionary-based sentiment analysis that extracts valuable insights from economic newspaper articles in the euro area without requiring article translation. We develop sentiment indices that accurately measure economic, labour, and inflation perceptions in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain using native-language texts. The aggregation of these country-specific sentiments provides a reliable indicator for the euro area as a whole, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in several nowcasting and forecasting experiments. This translation-free method significantly reduces resource requirements, facilitates easy replication across various languages, and enables daily updates. By eliminating the translation bottleneck, our approach emerges as one of the most timely and cost-effective economic measures available, offering a powerful tool for monitoring and forecasting business cycles in the multilingual context of the euro area. JEL Classification: E32, E37, C53, C82