The study comprehensively examines the economic importance of sport for the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. Sport not only fulfils central social functions such as health promotion, social integration and increasing life satisfaction, but also acts as an important – often underestimated – economic factor. Since sport is not…

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 them to predict the direction of consumption forecast errors. By testing the…

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 estimate the proportions of latent topics. These topics are…