Network based evidence of the financial impact of Covid-19 pandemic.

How much the largest worldwide companies, belonging to different sectors of the economy, are suffering from the pandemic? Are economic relations among them changing? In this paper, we address such issues by analyzing the top 50 S&P companies by means of market and textual data. Our work proposes a network analysis model that combines such two types of information to highlight the connections among companies with the purpose of investigating the relationships before and during the pandemic crisis. In doing so, we leverage a large amount of textual data through the employment of a sentiment score which is coupled with standard market data. Our results show that the COVID-19 pandemic has largely affected the US productive system, however differently sector by sector and with more impact during the second wave compared to the first.

Information Theoretic Causality Detection between Financial and Sentiment Data.

The interaction between the flow of sentiment expressed on blogs and media and the dynamics of the stock market prices are analyzed through an information-theoretic measure, the transfer entropy, to quantify causality relations. We analyzed daily stock price and daily social media sentiment for the top 50 companies in the Standard & Poor (S&P) index during the period from November 2018 to November 2020. We also analyzed news mentioning these companies during the same period. We found that there is a causal flux of information that links those companies. The largest fraction of significant causal links is between prices and between sentiments, but there is also significant causal information which goes both ways from sentiment to prices and from prices to sentiment. We observe that the strongest causal signal between sentiment and prices is associated with the Tech sector.

On the Improvement of Default Forecast Through Textual Analysis.

Textual analysis is a widely used methodology in several research areas. In this paper we apply textual analysis to augment the conventional set of account defaults drivers with new text based variables. Through the employment of ad hoc dictionaries and distance measures we are able to classify each account transaction into qualitative macro-categories. The aim is to classify bank account users into different client profiles and verify whether they can act as effective predictors of default through supervised classification models.