Do Anecdotes Matter? Exploring the Beige Book through Textual Analysis from 1970 to 2025

January 2026

Do Anecdotes Matter? Exploring the Beige Book through Textual Analysis from 1970 to 2025

Shengwu Du, Flora Haberkorn, Isabel Kitschelt, Seung Jung Lee, Anderson Monken, Dylan Saez, Kelsey Shipman, and Sandeep Thakur

Abstract:

We apply various natural language processing tools to see if the Beige Book is helpful in understanding economic activity. The Beige Book is a gathering of anecdotal compilations of current economic conditions from each Federal Reserve Bank, which is released to the public prior to FOMC meetings. We find that even controlling for lagged GDP growth and other metrics, the Beige Book sentiment provides meaningful explanatory power in nowcasting GDP growth and forecasting recessions, even more so than the yield spread or other news sentiment measures. The results on economic activity even hold in regional panel analysis. The Beige Book offers many more insights on the economy that can be gathered from even simple keyword tabulations. Topic modeling can also inform us about the different factors driving the narrative across particular periods of interest.

Keywords: Beige Book, real economic activity, recessions, nowcasting and forecasting, FinBERT, machine learning, sentiment analysis, natural language processing

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2026.004

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