Digitization technologies reshape the way people engage in social and business activities, transitioning events from in-person to virtual formats. However, existing evidence on the effects of digitization on participation remains fragmented and contradictory. The authors address this gap by...

This paper contributes to previous research on the efficient integration of forecasters' narratives into business cycle forecasts. Using a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, I quantify 19,300 paragraphs from German business cycle reports (1998-2021) and use...

This paper proposes a novel method to uncover shifting thematic priorities in textual business cycle reports and links them to macroeconomic fluctuations. To this end, I leverage qualitative business cycle forecasts published by leading German economic research institutes from 1970-2017 to...

Using computational methods, we investigate a data set of 874,125 sentences from 30 U.S. history textbooks used in California and Texas schools to consider how they discuss Asians/Asian Americans. Only 1% of all sentences in our sample has any mention of Asians. Most of these sentences focus on...

Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) specify the contractual rights of unionized workers, but their full legal content has not yet been analyzed by economists. This paper develops novel natural language methods to analyze the empirical determinants and economic value of these rights using a...

We examine the uptake and measurable effects of GPT-assisted writing in economics working paper abstracts. Focusing on the IZA discussion paper series, we detect a significant stylistic shift following the public release of ChatGPT-3.5 in March 2023. This shift appears in core textual...