• Asset Returns, News Topics, and Media Effects 

      Larsen, Vegard Høghaug; Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Papers;17/2017, Working paper, 2017)
      We decompose the textual data in a daily Norwegian business newspaper into news topics and investigate their predictive and causal role for asset prices. Our three main findings are: (1) a one unit innovation in the news ...
    • Boom or Gloom? Examining the Dutch Disease in Two-Speed Economies 

      Bjørnland, Hilde C.; Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Papers;12/2014, Working paper, 2014)
      Traditional studies of the Dutch disease do not account for productivity spillovers between the booming resource sector and other domestic sectors. We put forward a simple theory model that allows for such spillovers. We ...
    • Business cycle narratives 

      Larsen, Vegard Høghaug; Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working papers;3/2018, Working paper, 2018)
      This article quantifies the epidemiology of media narratives relevant to business cycles in the US, Japan, and Europe (euro area). We do so by first constructing daily business cycle indexes computed on the basis of the ...
    • Climate risk and commodity currencies 

      Kapfhammer, Felix; Larsen, Vegard H.; Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Paper;18/2020, Working paper, 2020)
      The positive relationship between real exchange rates and natural resource income is well understood and studied. However, climate change and the transition to a lower-carbon economy now challenges this relationship. We ...
    • Do Central Banks Respond Timely to Developments in the Global Economy? 

      Bjørnland, Hilde C.; Thorsrud, Leif Anders; Zahiri, Sepideh Khayati (Working Papers;19/2016, Working paper, 2016)
      Our analysis suggests; they do not! To arrive at this conclusion we construct a real-time data set of interest rate projections from central banks in three small open economies; New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden, and analyze ...
    • Does Forecast Combination Improve Norges Bank Inflation Forecasts? 

      Bjørnland, Hilde C.; Gerdrup, Karsten R.; Jore, Anne Sofie; Smith, Christie; Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Papers;1/2009, Working paper, 2009)
      We develop a system that provides model-based forecasts for inflation in Norway. Forecasts are recursively evaluated from 1999 to 2008. The performance of the models over this period is then used to derive weights that are ...
    • Dutch disease dynamics reconsidered 

      Bjørnland, Hilde C.; Thorsrud, Leif Anders; Torvik, Ragnar (Working papers;2018/1, Working paper, 2018)
      In this paper we develop the first model to incorporate the dynamic productivity consequences of both the spending effect and the resource movement effect of oil abundance. We show that doing so dramatically alters the ...
    • Evaluating Ensemble Density Combination - Forecasting GDP and Inflation 

      Gerdrup, Karsten R.; Jore, Anne Sofie; Smith, Christie; Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Papers;19/2009, Working paper, 2009)
      Forecast combination has become popular in central banks as a means to improve forecasts and to alleviate the risk of selecting poor models. However, if a model suite is populated with many similar models, then the weight ...
    • Forecasting GDP with Global Components. This Time Is Different 

      Bjørnland, Hilde C.; Ravazzolo, Francesco; Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Papers;5/2015, Working paper, 2015)
      A long strand of literature has shown that the world has become more global. Yet, the recent Great Global Recession turned out to be hard to predict, with forecasters across the world committing large forecast errors. We ...
    • Global and Regional Business Cycles. Shocks and Propagations 

      Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Papers;8/2013, Working paper, 2013)
      We study the synchronization of real and nominal variables across four different regions of the world, Asia, Europe, North and South America, covering 32 different countries. Employing a FAVAR framework, we distinguish ...
    • Narrative monetary policy surprises and the media 

      ter Ellen, Saskia; Larsen, Vegard H.; Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Paper;19/2019, Working paper, 2019)
      We propose a method to quantify narratives from textual data in a structured manner, and identify what we label "narrative monetary policy surprises" as the change in economic media coverage that can be explained by central ...
    • News media vs. FRED-MD for macroeconomic forecasting 

      Ellingsen, Jon; Larsen, Vegard H.; Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Paper;14/2020, Working paper, 2020)
      Using a unique dataset of 22.5 million news articles from the Dow Jones Newswires Archive, we perform an in depth real-time out-of-sample forecasting comparison study with one of the most widely used data sets in the newer ...
    • News-Driven Inflation Expectations and Information Rigidities 

      Larsen, Vegard Høghaug; Thorsrud, Leif Anders; Zhulanova, Julia (Working Paper;5/2019, Working paper, 2019)
      We investigate the role played by the media in the expectations formation process of households. Using a novel news-topic-based approach we show that news types the media choose to report on, e.g., fiscal policy, health, ...
    • Nowcasting GDP in Real-Time: A Density Combination Approach 

      Aastveit, Knut Are; Gerdrup, Karsten R.; Jore, Anne Sofie; Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Papers;11/2011, Working paper, 2011)
      In this paper we use U.S. real-time vintage data and produce combined density nowcasts for quarterly GDP growth from a system of three commonly used model classes. The density nowcasts are combined in two steps. First, a ...
    • Nowcasting Using News Topics. Big Data Versus Big Bank 

      Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Papers;20/2016, Working paper, 2016)
      The agents in the economy use a plethora of high frequency information, including news media, to guide their actions and thereby shape aggregate economic fluctuations. Traditional nowcasting approches have to a relatively ...
    • The World Is Not Enough! Small Open Economies and Regional Dependence 

      Aastveit, Knut Are; Bjørnland, Hilde C.; Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Papers;16/2011, Working paper, 2011)
      This paper bridges the new open economy factor augmented VAR (FAVAR) studies with the recent findings in the business cycle synchronization literature emphasizing the importance of regional factors. That is, we estimate ...
    • Weights and Pools for a Norwegian Density Combination 

      Bjørnland, Hilde C.; Gerdrup, Karsten R.; Smith, Christie; Jore, Anne Sofie; Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Papers;6/2010, Working paper, 2010)
      We apply a suite of models to produce quasi-real-time density forecasts of Norwegian GDP and inflation, and evaluate different combination and selection methods using the Kullback-Leibler information criterion (KLIC). We ...
    • What Drives Oil Prices? Emerging Versus Developed Economies 

      Aastveit, Knut Are; Bjørnland, Hilde C.; Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Papers;11/2012, Working paper, 2012)
      We analyze the importance of demand from emerging and developed economies as drivers of the real price of oil over the last two decades. Using a factor-augmented vector autoregressive (FAVAR) model that allows us to ...
    • Words Are the New Numbers: A Newsy Coincident Index of Business Cycles 

      Thorsrud, Leif Anders (Working Papers;21/2016, Working paper, 2016)
      I construct a daily business cycle index based on quarterly GDP and textual information contained in a daily business newspaper. The newspaper data are decomposed into time series representing newspaper topics using a ...