Macroeconomics

Consumer confidence index

Economic indicator

2019-20 coronavirus outbreak

World Wide Web

Construct (python library)

Newspaper

Virology

Economics

Data mining

Computer science

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)

Outbreak

Business

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Natural language processing

Recession

Advertising

Nowcasting

Geography

Index (typography)

Economic policy

Econometrics

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Artificial intelligence

Measure (data warehouse)

Medicine

Programming language

Meteorology

European commission

Sentiment analysis

Disease

European union

Pathology

Economics Letters

We construct a new newspaper-based sentiment indicator for Spain that allows to monitor economic activity in real-time. As opposed to survey-based confidence indicators that are released at the end of the month, our indicator can be constructed on a daily basis. We compare our index with the popular Economic Sentiment Indicator of the European Commission and show that ours performs significantly better in nowcasting the Spanish GDP. Moreover, it proves to be helpful to predict the current COVID-19 recession from an earlier date.

Can news help measure economic sentiment? An application in COVID-19 times