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  <title>EconStor Community:</title>
  <link rel="alternate" href="https://hdl.handle.net/10419/175" />
  <subtitle />
  <id>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/175</id>
  <updated>2026-05-07T00:53:52Z</updated>
  <dc:date>2026-05-07T00:53:52Z</dc:date>
  <entry>
    <title>Narrating inflation: How German economic journalists explain post-covid price rises</title>
    <link rel="alternate" href="https://hdl.handle.net/10419/313658" />
    <author>
      <name>Schmidt, Tobias</name>
    </author>
    <id>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/313658</id>
    <updated>2025-04-25T14:02:38Z</updated>
    <published>2025-01-01T00:00:00Z</published>
    <summary type="text">Title: Narrating inflation: How German economic journalists explain post-covid price rises
Authors: Schmidt, Tobias
Abstract: This paper examines the pivotal role of journalists in shaping economic narratives, focusing on inflation coverage in Germany in 2022. While the media's influence on disseminating economic narratives is widely acknowledged, little research has focused on journalists, the agents responsible for content production. Using a mixed-method approach combining survey data with media content analysis, this study investigates how economic journalists explain inflation causes and persistence compared to professional economists. The results from surveys conducted during peak inflation (10.4%) show that journalists hold less optimistic views on inflation persistence than experts and that they are more likely to attribute inflation to specific protagonists, particularly the European Central Bank (ECB) and corporate profit-seeking. The ECB's role emerges as an especially contentious issue among journalists, revealing significant disagreement within the profession. Analysis of media coverage reveals notable alignment between journalists' perceptions and actual content, especially regarding the emphasis placed on the ECB's role-despite experts considering monetary policy a relatively minor factor. While this might suggest that journalists' personal narratives influence media coverage, the study's design precludes causal claims. The findings underscore the need for further research into how journalists' personal narratives impact public discourse on economic matters.</summary>
    <dc:date>2025-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>The inflation attention cycle: Updating the Inflation Perception Indicator (IPI) up to February 2023. A research note</title>
    <link rel="alternate" href="https://hdl.handle.net/10419/270752" />
    <author>
      <name>Müller, Henrik</name>
    </author>
    <author>
      <name>Schmidt, Tobias</name>
    </author>
    <author>
      <name>Rieger, Jonas</name>
    </author>
    <author>
      <name>Hornig, Nico</name>
    </author>
    <author>
      <name>Hufnagel, Lena Marie</name>
    </author>
    <id>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/270752</id>
    <updated>2023-11-08T02:11:09Z</updated>
    <published>2023-01-01T00:00:00Z</published>
    <summary type="text">Title: The inflation attention cycle: Updating the Inflation Perception Indicator (IPI) up to February 2023. A research note
Authors: Müller, Henrik; Schmidt, Tobias; Rieger, Jonas; Hornig, Nico; Hufnagel, Lena Marie</summary>
    <dc:date>2023-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>An increasing sense of urgency: The Inflation Perception Indicator (IPI) to 30 June 2022 - a research note</title>
    <link rel="alternate" href="https://hdl.handle.net/10419/263920" />
    <author>
      <name>Müller, Henrik</name>
    </author>
    <author>
      <name>Rieger, Jonas</name>
    </author>
    <author>
      <name>Schmidt, Tobias</name>
    </author>
    <author>
      <name>Hornig, Nico</name>
    </author>
    <id>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/263920</id>
    <updated>2023-11-19T02:10:06Z</updated>
    <published>2022-01-01T00:00:00Z</published>
    <summary type="text">Title: An increasing sense of urgency: The Inflation Perception Indicator (IPI) to 30 June 2022 - a research note
Authors: Müller, Henrik; Rieger, Jonas; Schmidt, Tobias; Hornig, Nico</summary>
    <dc:date>2022-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>A German inflation narrative. How the media frame price dynamics: Results from a RollingLDA analysis</title>
    <link rel="alternate" href="https://hdl.handle.net/10419/251352" />
    <author>
      <name>Müller, Henrik</name>
    </author>
    <author>
      <name>Schmidt, Tobias</name>
    </author>
    <author>
      <name>Rieger, Jonas</name>
    </author>
    <author>
      <name>Hufnagel, Lena Marie</name>
    </author>
    <author>
      <name>Hornig, Nico</name>
    </author>
    <id>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/251352</id>
    <updated>2023-12-11T02:58:09Z</updated>
    <published>2022-01-01T00:00:00Z</published>
    <summary type="text">Title: A German inflation narrative. How the media frame price dynamics: Results from a RollingLDA analysis
Authors: Müller, Henrik; Schmidt, Tobias; Rieger, Jonas; Hufnagel, Lena Marie; Hornig, Nico
Abstract: In this paper, we present a new indicator to measure the media coverage of inflation. Our Inflation Perception Indicator (IPI) for Germany is based on a corpus of three million articles published by broadsheet newspapers between January 2001 and February 2022. It is designed to detect thematic trends, thereby providing new insights into the dynamics of inflation perception over time. These results may prove particularly valuable at the current juncture, where massive uncertainty prevails due to geopolitical conflicts and the pandemic-related supply-chain jitters. Economists inspired by Shiller (2017; 2020) have called for analyses of economic narratives to complement econometric analyses. The IPI operationalizes such an approach by isolating inflation narratives circulating in the media. Methodically, the IPI makes use of RollingLDA (Rieger et al. 2021), a dynamic topic modeling approach refining the rather static original LDA (Blei et al. 2003) to allow for changes in the model's structure over time. By modeling the process of collective memory, where experiences of the past are partly overwritten and altered by new ones and partly sink into oblivion, RollingLDA is a potent tool to capture the evolution of economic narratives as social phenomena. In addition, it is suitable to produce stable time-series, to the effect that the IPI can be updated frequently. Our initial results show a narrative landscape in turmoil. Never in the past two decades has there been such a broad shift in inflation perception, and therefore, possibly, in inflation expectations. Also, second-round effects, such as significant wage demands, that have not played a major role in Germany for a long time, seem to be in the making. Towards the end of the time horizon, raw material prices are high on the agenda, too, triggered by the Russian war against Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions against the aggressor. We would like to encourage researchers to use our data and are happy to share it on request.</summary>
    <dc:date>2022-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
  </entry>
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