Economists in the 2008 financial crisis: Slow to see, fast to act

Daniel Levy, Tamir Mayer, Alon Raviv

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study the economics- and finance-scholars’ reaction to the 2008 financial crisis using machine learning language analyses methods of Latent Dirichlet Allocation and dynamic topic modelling algorithms, to analyze the texts of 14,270 NBER working papers covering the 1999–2016 period. We find that academic scholars as a group were insufficiently engaged in crises’ studies before 2008. As the crisis unraveled, however, they switched their focus to studying the crisis, its causes, and consequences. Thus, the scholars were “slow-to-see,” but they were “fast-to-act.” Their initial response to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis is consistent with these conclusions.

Original languageEnglish
Article number100986
JournalJournal of Financial Stability
Volume60
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Keywords

  • 2008 financial crisis
  • Dynamic topic modeling
  • LDA textual analysis
  • Machine learning
  • great recessionNBER working papers

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