It is not necessarily the case that interest rates, credit spreads,
and dividend yields move in a consistent direction during the
recession phase of a business cycle. I therefore introduce a dummy
variable that explicitly accounts for whether the economy is in
recession during the period concerned. This confirms the intuitive
notion that news is more negative during recession, Speculators
significantly increase their net position size during recession which
suggests that factors in addition to credit (perhaps the safe haven
nature of gold) are at play during this period. Hedgers also increase
the magnitude of their net position, this is perhaps a result of risk
aversion increasing during recession and thus producers seek to
hedge a greater proportion of output by taking larger short
positions.
Since it is apparent that the business cycle has an impact on
both news sentiment, and the net trading positions of speculators
and hedgers, it is natural to consider whether this also influences
the relationship between news sentiment and returns. A regression
specification of the following form is utilized:
Rt ¼ b0 þ b1Newst þ b2Rect þ b3Newst Rect þ b4Xt þ et ð4Þ
where Newst is the sentiment of the highly relevant newswire items
released during period t, Rect is a dummy variable indicating
whether the economy is in recession (1) or not (0), NewstRect is
an interaction term between news sentiment and recession, Xt is
a vector of control variables including lagged returns and a dummy
variable for the day of the week, and et is the error term. Additional
regression specifications replace the recession dummy variable
with a High Credit Spread dummy that indicates whether credit
spreads are in the top quintile (1) or not (0).