Enrichment of the Banque de France’s monthly business survey: lessons from textual analysis of business leaders’ comments

Abstract

In the context of the Banque de France’s monthly business survey, this document presents
the main findings of the textual analysis of business leaders’ comments. First, the richness
of these data is illustrated via an elementary sentiment index and the identification of the
main social movements since 2009 by means of keywords. Then, the article presents two
statistical applications whose reproducibility is discussed. The first one, applied to the 2018
yellow vests and the 2019 strikes, aims to estimate the impact on GDP of an event whose
effect is unequivocal. The second, backed by the study of Brexit, aims to characterize,
using a supervised learning model and word vectors, the effects of a complex event with
multiple impacts.