Text-as-Data: An Economics Perspective

Formal quantitative methods of text analysis – approaches collectively called “text-as-data” – are playing an increasingly important role in contemporary social sciences. At the same time, while their introduction in political science and partly in sociology is a natural process, largely consistent with the logic of the development of these disciplines, the place of “text-as-data” in economics is ambiguous; while corresponding to the general trends towards mastering an ever-growing range of quantitative methods, “text-as-data” at the same time contradicts some important principles of economics – in particular, attention to revealed preferences rather than rhetoric, and the principles of the “credibility revolution”. The growing role of “text-as-data” demonstrates the complex and nonlinear nature of the progress of quantitative methods in economics (and in the social sciences in general).