Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/278370 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Series/Report no.: 
MAGKS Joint Discussion Paper Series in Economics No. 07-2023
Publisher: 
Philipps-University Marburg, School of Business and Economics, Marburg
Abstract: 
Fiscal policy is made in parliament. We go to the roots of changes of fiscal policy in Germany and use a novel data set on all parliamentary speeches in the Bundestag from 1960 to 2021. We propose an embedding-based approach, which allows the representation of words and documents in a shared vector space, in order to measure fiscal policy-related sentiment in parliamentary debates at a scale from contractionary to expansionary. For this purpose, a dictionary containing terms related to expansionary and contractionary policy measures is created. We put fiscal sentiment into a series of recursively-identified vector autoregressive (VAR) models to show that a change in fiscal sentiment causes a change in government spending and has strong effects on the macroeconomy. The results support the notion that the debate in parliament contains information for the identification of government spending shocks.
Subjects: 
text mining
word embeddings
VAR models
identification
government spending
JEL: 
C89
E60
E62
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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