The Corridor of Uncertainty

Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England made a nice mention of a paper by David Tuckett, Rickard Nyman, and myself in a speech entitled The Corridor of Uncertainty, saying:

To that end, the Bank is investing in improving its own data architecture and analytics. Perhaps a more timely reading of the economic and financial tea leaves can be found by scraping the web or by semantic search on social media sites? Recent research has suggested just that. These are the sorts of question the Bank’s rocket scientists can help us answer.

It's any interesting speech, and worth clicking through to read in its entirety. The paper cited is related to work Rickard did while an intern at the BoE last summer.

New Papers on Psychologically-Directed Big Data Analysis in Economics

I wanted to announce that my work with The Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty is beginning to yield even more interesting papers. We've got two papers coming up at the European Central Bank Workshop using Big Data for Forecasting and Statistics. One of these is in collaboration with David Gregory and Sujit Kapadia at the Bank of England, along with my ongoing collaborators David Tuckett, and our student Rickard Nyman, entitled "News and narratives in financial systems: exploiting big data for systemic risk assessment" (the paper is pending release approval, but the presentation is available here). It's the outcome of a Rickard's internship at The Bank. The other is with David, Rickard, and our other team member, Paul Ormerod. It's entitled "Big Data and Economic Forecasting: A Top-Down Approach Using Directed Algorithmic Text Analysis" (click for an offprint).Paul, David, Rickard and I also have a paper entitled "Bringing Social-Psychological Variables into Economic Modeling: Uncertainty, Animal Spirits and the Recovery from the Great Recession" at the International Economic Associations 17th World Conference at the Dead Sea, in Jordon.