I study how economic narratives shape markets and the macroeconomy.

This paper studies whether oil-market narratives have macroeconomic effects, and whether those effects differ depending on whether narratives convey directional information or uncertainty. I construct new monthly oil narrative sentiment and uncertainty indices from Wall Street Journal and New York Times articles from 1953 to 2022 and classify oil-related coverage into five narrative types. Using the type-specific narrative decomposition as external instruments in a Proxy-SVAR, I identify two structurally distinct narrative shocks. A bullish narrative sentiment shock raises the real oil price persistently, increases world industrial production, raises world oil production, and gradually passes through to consumer prices, consistent with a demand-side information channel. By contrast, an elevated narrative uncertainty shock reduces world oil production and world industrial production, while producing only a muted response of the real oil price and consumer prices, consistent with a supply-side real-options channel. When both shocks hit simultaneously, the combined effect produces a stagflationary pattern in which oil prices and inflation rise while production and activity respond weakly. These findings show that oil-market narratives contain macroeconomically relevant variation beyond physical oil shocks and that separating directional tone from ambiguity is essential for understanding how oil news transmits to the broader economy.

Oil-market news can signal very different risks for banks exposed to oil-producing regions. This paper studies how newspaper-based oil narratives are associated with U.S. bank balance sheets. Supply-disruption narratives predict higher cumulative loan-loss provisions and net charge-offs, lower loan growth, lower deposit growth, and weaker short-run profitability among more oil-exposed banks. Demand-salience narratives move in the opposite direction, predicting stronger lending, deposit growth, and profitability, while provisions and charge-offs decline. These findings show that oil narratives do not have one banking effect: some oil stories become bank risk, while others coincide with expansion in oil-exposed banking markets

This paper uses textual analysis to identify and measure the impact of OPEC news shocks on oil markets and the broader economy, developing novel methods to extract information from OPEC announcements and communications.

This research examines the welfare consequences of asset price bubble cycles, analyzing how boom–bust patterns in asset markets affect economic efficiency and social welfare.

This paper develops a novel forecasting methodology combining principal component analysis with weighted elastic net regularization to improve crude oil price return predictions using high-dimensional predictor sets.