Lagging behind? Emotions in newspaper articles and stock market prices in the Netherlands

This study investigates emotions in Dutch newspaper articles and their effects on, and responses to, opening prices of 21 stocks listed on the Amsterdam Exchange index for twelve years (2002–2013). With regard to the financial context, we employed a selection of the Dutch Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count dictionary to automatically content analyze emotional tone in news articles (N = 128,507). Neither positive nor negative emotions in news articles show consistent effects on the opening prices of stocks the following day. Granger causality tests suggest, however, that newspapers rather reflect movements on the stock market the following days by using more negative emotional words after an increase in the change of the opening prices.

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