Leif Anders Thorsrud

leif anders thorsrud bi
Associate Professor
Department of Economics, BI Norwegian Business School

Leif Anders Thorsrud is Associate Professor at the BI Norwegian Business School, and manager of the research centre CAMP (Centre for Applied Macroeconomics and Commodity Prices) at the BI Norwegian Business School. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and International Relations, and a Master of Philosophy in Economics from the University of Oslo. He obtained his Phd in Economics from BI Norwegian Business School.

 

His main area of research is within applied macroeconomics, time series, and machine learning. Special interests include the study of natural resources, business cycles, textual analysis and forecasting. He has published in leading journals such as the Economic Journal, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, and Journal of Applied Econometrics. He is also the co-author of the book “Applied Time Series Macroeconomics”.

He has previously held positions as staff economist at Norges Bank and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and as senior researcher at Norges Bank.

 

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NLP in Applied Macroeconomics and Forecasting

Abstract

Expectations, and expectation formation, play a crucial role in all close to all economic models. Despite this, text, narratives, and written news, have been used relatively little when modelling agents’ information set, i.e., what they condition on when forming expectations. In this presentation, I present evidence showing that news coverage and stories; i) Contain high frequency and narrative sound information about important macroeconomic variables such as inflation, consumption, and the business cycle; ii) Potentially play an important role in terms of understanding information rigidities; iii) Allow us to measure important concepts, such as climate change transition risk, to a larger extent than what is possible using more traditional data.