Rémi Vivès

Internal seminars
phd seminar

Rémi Vivès

AMSE
Whatever it takes to change beliefs: Evidence from Twitter
Joint with
Michael Stiefel
Venue

IBD Salle 16

Îlot Bernard du Bois - Salle 16

AMU - AMSE
5-9 boulevard Maurice Bourdet
13001 Marseille

Date(s)
Tuesday, February 27 2018| 12:30pm to 1:15pm
Contact(s)

Edward Levavasseur: edward.levavasseur[at]univ-amu.fr
Océane Piétri: oceane.pietri[at]univ-amu.fr
Morgan Raux: morgan.raux[at]univ-amu.fr

Abstract

The sovereign debt literature emphasizes the possibility of avoiding a self-fulfilling default crisis if markets anticipate the central bank to act as the lender of last resort. Motivated by the recent European sovereign debt crisis and the “Whatever it Takes” episode, this project investigates the extent to which changes in beliefs about an intervention of the European Central Bank (ECB), via a bailout program, explain the sudden reduction of government bond yields for the so-called PIIGS countries. To proxy beliefs, we study Twitter data from July to September 2012 and extract beliefs using machine learning techniques. Our preliminary results, only based on our training sample, suggest that the drop in sovereign yields can be explained by changes in beliefs about the central bank intervention that effectively coordinated beliefs away from the self-fulfilling equilibrium.