IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oxf/wpaper/973.html

Narrative-Driven Fluctuations in Sentiment: Evidence Linking Traditional and Social Media

Author

Listed:
  • Alistair Macaulay
  • Wenting Song

Abstract

This paper studies the role of narratives for macroeconomic fluctuations. Micro-founding narratives as directed acyclic graphs, we show how exposure to different narratives can affect expectations in an otherwise-standard macroeconomic framework. We identify such competing narratives in news media reports on the US yield curve inversion in 2019, using techniques in natural language processing. Linking this to data from Twitter, we show that exposure to the narrative of an imminent recession causes consumers to display a more pessimistic sentiment, while exposure to a more neutral narrative implies no such change in sentiment. Applying the same technique to media narratives on inflation, we estimate that a shift to a viral narrative of inflation damaging the real economy in 2021 accounts for 42% of the fall in consumer sentiment in the second half of the year.

Suggested Citation

  • Alistair Macaulay & Wenting Song, 2022. "Narrative-Driven Fluctuations in Sentiment: Evidence Linking Traditional and Social Media," Economics Series Working Papers 973, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:973
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d1615e12-f8d8-411f-ae67-c8bcf3f217b6
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Vito Cormun & Kim Ristolainen, 2024. "Exchange Rate Narratives," Discussion Papers 167, Aboa Centre for Economics.
    2. Chenyu Hou & Tao Wang, 2025. "Uncovering Subjective Models from Survey Expectations," Staff Working Papers 25-31, Bank of Canada.
    3. Demgensky, Lisa & Fritsche, Ulrich, 2023. "Narratives on the causes of inflation in Germany: First results of a pilot study," WiSo-HH Working Paper Series 77, University of Hamburg, Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, WISO Research Laboratory.
    4. Colesanti Senni, Chiara & Goel, Skand, 2025. "Nature scenario plausibility: A dynamic Bayesian network approach," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 236(C).
    5. Weinig, Max & Fritsche, Ulrich, 2025. "Going viral: Inflation narratives and the macroeconomy," WiSo-HH Working Paper Series 86, University of Hamburg, Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, WISO Research Laboratory, revised 2025.
    6. Kai Gehring & Matteo Grigoletto, 2023. "Analyzing Climate Change Policy Narratives with the Character-Role Narrative Framework," CESifo Working Paper Series 10429, CESifo.
    7. Xing Guo & Alistair Macaulay & Wenting Song, 2024. "The (Mis)Allocation of Corporate News," Staff Working Papers 24-47, Bank of Canada.
    8. Kai Gehring & Matteo Grigoletto, 2025. "Virality: What Makes Narratives Go Viral, and Does it Matter?," CESifo Working Paper Series 12064, CESifo.
    9. Chenyu Hou and Tao Wang, 2024. "Uncovering Subjective Models from Survey Expectations," Discussion Papers dp24-09, Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University.
    10. Alexa Kaminski & Alistair Macaulay & Wenting Song, 2026. "Monetary Policy Narratives and the Transmission of Monetary Policy," School of Economics Discussion Papers 0126, School of Economics, University of Surrey.
    11. Francesco Bilotta & Alberto Binetti & Giacomo Manferdini, 2025. "Blameocracy: Causal Rhetoric in Politics," Papers 2504.06550, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2025.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C8 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Data Collection and Data Estimation Methodology; Computer Programs
    • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
    • D84 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Expectations; Speculations
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • E3 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles
    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
    • E4 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates
    • E43 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects
    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
    • E5 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit
    • G - Financial Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:oxf:wpaper:973. 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: Anne Pouliquen The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Anne Pouliquen to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfeixuk.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.