Research

Sentometrics is a portmanteau of sentiment and econometrics. The term is used to describe the econometric research that investigates the transformation of large volumes of qualitative sentiment data into quantitative sentiment variables, and their subsequent application in an econometric analysis of the relationships between sentiment and other variables.

Below we list some of our own contributions to the academic literature, together with the research papers that use our thematic indicator time series. We indeed welcome very much academic researchers to use our thematic indicator series free of charge. Feel free to contact us when interested, even for (ideas about) media-indicators that are currently not available on the public access API.

Publications

2024

The Risk of Ignorance: How Financial Institutions Can Make a Difference in Large-Scale Media ESG News Monitoring. Sentometrics white paper (Boudt, Delmarcelle, Petitjean).

2023

Nowcasting GDP through the lens of economic states. National Bank of Belgium Working Papers (Boudt, De Block, Langenus, Reusens).

Climate change concerns and the performance of green versus brown stocks. Management Science (Ardia, Bluteau, Boudt, Inghelbrecht).

Media abnormal tone, earnings announcements, and the stock market. Journal of Financial Markets (Ardia, Bluteau, Boudt).

2022

The Causal Effects of Lockdown Policies on Health and Macroeconomic Outcomes. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics (Arias, Fernández-Villaverde, Rubio-Ramírez, Shin).

Daily news sentiment and monthly surveys: A mixed-frequency dynamic factor model for nowcasting consumer confidence. International Journal of Forecasting (Algaba, Borms, Boudt, Verbeken).

2021

The R Package sentometrics to Compute, Aggregate, and Predict with Textual Sentiment. Journal of Statistical Software (Ardia, Bluteau, Borms, Boudt).

Semi-supervised text mining for monitoring the news about the ESG performance of companies. Data science for economics and finance (Borms, Boudt, Van Holle, Willems).

2020

Econometrics meets sentiment: An overview of methodology and applications. Journal of Economic Surveys (Algaba, Ardia, Bluteau, Borms, Boudt).

The economic policy uncertainty index for Flanders, Wallonia and Belgium. BFW digitaal/RBF numérique (Algaba, Borms, Boudt, Van Pelt).

2019

Questioning the news about economic growth: Sparse forecasting using thousands of news-based sentiment values. International Journal of Forecasting (Ardia, Bluteau, Boudt). IJF best paper award 2018-2019.

Jockeying for position in CEO letters: Impression management and sentiment analytics. Financial Management (Boudt, Thewissen).

2018

When does the tone of earnings press releases matter? International Review of Financial Analysis (Boudt, Thewissen, Torsin).

2016

Managers set the tone: Equity incentives and the tone of earnings press releases. Journal of Banking and Finance (Arslan-Ayaydin, Boudt, Thewissen).

2014

Intraday liquidity dynamics and news releases around price jumps: Evidence from the DJIA stocks. Journal of Financial Markets (Boudt, Petitjean).