The Macroeconomics of Narratives

Abstract

We study the macroeconomic implications of narratives, defined as beliefs about the economy that spread contagiously.In an otherwise standard business-cycle model, narratives generate persistent and belief-driven fluctuations.Sufficiently contagious narratives can "go viral," generating hysteresis in the model's unique equilibrium.Empirically, we use natural-languageprocessing methods to measure firms' narratives.Consistent with the theory, narratives spread contagiously and firms expand after adopting optimistic narratives, even though these narratives have no predictive power for future firm fundamentals.Quantitatively, narratives explain 32% and 18% of the output reductions over the early 2000s recession and Great Recession, respectively, and 19% of output variance.

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