Economic intelligence corpus
Official Fed, BLS, and Census narratives form the core. An expanding ProQuest news corpus brings higher-frequency reporting on markets, fiscal policy, and financial risk into the research agenda.
02 / EconBERT
Economic language.
Investment insight.
What is changing in the economy—and what deserves a closer look in markets? EconBERT turns economic text into structured measures of economic tone across growth, inflation, financial conditions, and risk. It gives quantitative researchers, investment teams, and portfolio leaders a consistent lens on the economic narrative, beyond whether a headline simply sounds optimistic or pessimistic.
Try EconBERT on your own text
Research across markets
Macro & multi-asset
Equities
Rates & credit
FX
Commodities
LLM-guided economic interpretation
An LLM teacher applies a macroeconomic rubric to label passages positive, neutral, or negative. The target is economic direction, not emotional wording: easing price pressure can signal improvement even in a cautious statement.
Teacher–student knowledge distillation
Teacher-generated labels transfer the task to a compact DistilBERT student. This label-based distillation makes repeated scoring practical; the research model is fitted on pre-2013 documents and then frozen for out-of-sample evaluation.
Narrative signals for nowcasting
Passage scores become source-balanced monthly tone indices. A complementary index combines eight economic themes. Paired with real-time data vintages, these let researchers test whether narratives add timely information to macro and market forecasts.
The information set
From official releases
to the flow of market news.
A common economic lens across different kinds of text. Official documents anchor the current model; higher-frequency news broadens the questions the research can ask.
Low Frequency Monthly Release
Official economic narratives
Federal Reserve Beige Books and FOMC minutes; BLS employment and CPI releases; Census retail-sales reports.
High Frequency Daily Release
Major news & market wires
Global Newsstream coverage from major U.S. newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, plus Dow Jones Institutional News.
The high-frequency news extension is ongoing research; its contribution to volatility forecasting is still being evaluated.
Explore the economic language
One economy.
Eight connected themes.
These word clouds show the vocabulary of each topic and its associated economic tone. Explore a theme to see how its narrative can frame a different investment-research question.
01 Inflation & prices
02 Labor market
03 Real activity
04 Monetary policy
05 Financial conditions
06 Housing
07 Consumption & retail
08 Uncertainty & risks
01 / Inflation and prices
Look beyond “prices rose.”
Inflation language connects household purchasing power, firms’ cost pressures, and the policy outlook. Economic context matters more than the emotional charge of a word.
Investment-research question
Are price pressures easing—or shifting between consumer demand, input costs, and margins?
Rates · Equities · Commodities
02 / Labor market
Read the balance of resilience and cooling.
Employment narratives connect hiring, labor supply, wages, and household income—dimensions that a single headline payroll number cannot fully describe.
Investment-research question
Is hiring moderating alongside resilient demand, or pointing to a broader slowdown?
Equities · Rates · Multi-asset
03 / Real activity
Follow the demand behind the cycle.
Language about production, orders, and business activity provides a narrative view of the real economy alongside released macroeconomic data.
Investment-research question
Is momentum broadening across the economy, or becoming concentrated in a few sectors?
Cyclical equities · Commodities · Macro
04 / Monetary policy
Put policy language in economic context.
Central-bank communication links the outlook for activity and inflation to policy decisions. Economic tone is distinct from a simple hawkish-versus-dovish label.
Investment-research question
How is the balance of growth and inflation concerns evolving around policy decisions?
Rates · FX · Equity duration
05 / Financial conditions
Track the language of credit transmission.
Banking and credit narratives describe how financing conditions reach households and firms, complementing market-based measures of financial stress.
Investment-research question
Are tighter lending conditions becoming a headwind for investment and demand?
Credit · Financial equities · Multi-asset
06 / Housing
Read a rate-sensitive part of the economy.
Housing narratives connect affordability, residential construction, and sales with the wider transmission of interest rates and household demand.
Investment-research question
Is the housing narrative signaling renewed demand or continued financing pressure?
Real estate · Homebuilders · Materials
07 / Consumption and retail sales
Connect the consumer to the growth outlook.
Retail and spending narratives add context to changes in household demand, connecting the macro outlook with questions about consumer-facing sectors.
Investment-research question
Is spending strength widespread, or masking softer demand in particular categories?
Consumer equities · Credit · Macro
08 / Uncertainty and downside risks
Distinguish caution from deterioration.
Risk language can reflect uncertainty about the outlook or evidence of weaker conditions. The distinction matters when interpreting cautious economic communication.
Investment-research question
Are downside concerns becoming broader or more economically specific?
Risk research · Credit · Multi-asset
How to read the clouds
Word size indicates topic distinctiveness. Color indicates average EconBERT economic tone—not a fixed positive or negative dictionary entry.
Negative
Near-neutral
Positive
Original word clouds from the job market paper, Figures 4–5 (September 26, 2026), based on the official-document corpus. These are descriptive views of language, not trading signals or evidence of asset-specific forecast performance.
Built for research, not just a score
An additional information set.
A testable investment question.
For a quant team, narrative indices can sit alongside structured data in a forecasting pipeline. For investment analysts and portfolio leaders, the eight themes provide a consistent way to organize questions about the cycle, policy, and risk.
The job market paper evaluates monthly indices in real-time nowcasting and forecasting exercises spanning macroeconomic activity, Treasury rates, equity returns, volatility, and credit conditions. Applications to individual sectors, FX, and commodities are research opportunities, not demonstrated trading results.