On going research projects:

Climate Risk and Commodity Currencies
with Leif Anders Thorsrud and Felix Kapfhammer.

The positive relationship between real exchange rates and natural resource income is well understood and studied. However, climate change and the transition to a lower-carbon economy now challenges this relationship. We document this by proposing a novel news-media-based measure of climate change transition risk, and show that when such risk is high, major commodity currencies experience a persistent depreciation and the relationship between commodity price fluctuations and currencies tends to become weaker

Business cycle narratives 
with Leif Anders Thorsrud

This article quantifies the epidemiology of media narratives relevant to business cycles in the US, Japan, and Europe (euro area). We do so by first constructing daily business cycle indexes computed on the basis of the news topics the media writes about. At a broad level, the most important news narratives are shown to be associated with general macroeconomic developments, finance, and (geo-)politics. However, a vast set of narratives contributes to our index estimates across time, especially in times of expansion. In times of trouble, narratives associated with economic fluctuations become more sparse. Likewise, we show that narratives do go viral, but mostly so when growth is low. While narratives interact in complicated ways, we document that some are clearly associated with economic fundamentals. Other narratives, on the other hand, show no such relationship, and are likely better explained by classical work capturing the market’s animal spirits.