Presidents’ discourses: Lags, leads or mere words?

Abstract

Introduction: This study seeks to investigate the relationship between the words of the speeches of the various presidents of the Portuguese Republic (1976–2019) and the surrounding economic context. Methodology: We filtered all official speeches by Portuguese presidents from July 1976 to December 2019 and constructed a series of each word’s frequency categorized in the group of economic words. Using autoregressive distributed lag regressions and cointegration analysis, complemented with the analysis of structural breaks, we evaluated how those words’ frequencies changed relative to changing inflation and unemployment rates in Portugal. Results and Discussion: Our results show that certain words have tended to coincide with rises in inflation and unemployment in Portugal, which supports the hypothesis that Portuguese presidents’ speeches tend to reflect economic and political events.