A Comparison of Norwegian Business Cycle Indicators

Abstract

This thesis investigates how different economic indicators can classify economic recession and forecast GDP in Norway. The study focuses particularly on the Financial News Index (FNI) and the financial crisis. In-sample evaluation is done through Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) and analyzed with the help of AUROC score. Out-of-sample evaluation is done through simple linear regression and analyzed with the help of Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). With both in-sample and out-of-sample analyzes, our results indicate that FNI should be considered as a highly valuable economic indicator in the future.