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Working Paper
The Beige Book and the Business Cycle: Using Beige Book Anecdotes to Construct Recession Probabilities
The Federal Reserve releases the Beige Book prior to each Federal Open Market Committee meeting. The report is a narrative based on anecdotal and qualitative information collected from a wide range of contacts in each of the 12 Federal Reserve Districts. We take the lexicon approach to text analysis to create sentiment indexes that track changes in economic conditions from the very first Beige Book in May 1970 to the most recent (at the time of writing) in October 2024. We create additional indexes to account for various current-event shocks, such as political events or natural disasters that ...
Journal Article
Regional Economic Sentiment: Constructing Quantitative Estimates from the Beige Book and Testing Their Ability to Forecast Recessions
We use natural language processing methods to quantify the sentiment expressed in the Federal Reserve's anecdotal summaries of current economic conditions in the national and 12 Federal Reserve District-level economies as published eight times per year in the Beige Book since 1970. We document that both national and District-level economic sentiment tend to rise and fall with the US business cycle. But economic sentiment is extremely heterogeneous across Districts, and we find that national economic sentiment is not always the simple aggregation of District-level sentiment. We show that the ...
Quantifying the Beige Book’s “Soft” Data
Some economists believe anecdotal findings in the Beige Book are inferior to hard economic data. This analysis suggests the report’s ‘soft’ content is actually quite firm.
Journal Article
The Chicago Fed Survey of Business Conditions: Quantifying the Seventh District’s Beige Book Report
In this article, the authors describe a new survey methodology used by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in constructing the Seventh District?s Beige Book report called the Chicago Fed Survey of Business Conditions (CFSBC). The design of the survey allows the authors to create a new set of quantitative indexes that track economic activity in real time.
Journal Article
Does the Beige Book Reflect U.S. Employment and Inflation Trends?
Simple, automated text analysis can extract useful metrics from the Beige Book.
Newsletter
Using the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book to Track Economic Activity
This article provides the public a first look at a new set of indexes constructed from the Chicago Fed?s Beige Book survey, and describes their ability to track economic activity.
Journal Article
Using Beige Book Text Analysis to Measure Supply Chain Disruptions
Simple, automated text analysis can extract useful metrics about supply chain disruptions from the Beige Book.
Working Paper
The Beige Book and the Business Cycle: Using Beige Book Anecdotes to Construct Recession Probabilities
The Federal Reserve releases the Beige Book prior to each Federal Open Market Committee meeting. The report is a narrative based on anecdotal and qualitative information collected from a wide range of contacts in each of the 12 Federal Reserve Districts. We take the lexicon approach to text analysis to create sentiment indexes that track changes in economic conditions from the very first Beige Book in May 1970 to the most recent (at the time of writing) in October 2024. We create additional indexes to account for various current-event shocks, such as political events or natural disasters that ...