The NEAR project lays the foundation for the development of the University Alliance Ruhr (UAR) into a leading European location in the new field of Narrative Economics and strengthens the UAR’s competence in Empirical Economic Research. NEAR contributes theoretical, methodological, and empirical research:

In theoretical development, NEAR is focused on a conceptual clarification of the narrative concept and the development of new modeling approaches dealing with the diffusion of economic narratives using agent-based models.

Methodologically, NEAR researchers develop methods for economic narrative extraction from text data, for improving the calibration of topic models for narrative economic issues and for establishing inference methods tailored to narrative research.

Empirically, NEAR investigates and tests the causal connections between media-conveyed narratives and macroeconomic and financial dynamics. NEAR also examine whether narratives have predictive power for economic variables. NEAR also puts substantial focus on sustainability narratives.

NEAR pools expertise from the fields of Economic Theory, Economic Journalism, Finance, Statistics/Econometrics and Natural Language Processing. A series of workshops have already initiated interdisciplinary exchange within the UAR and will continue internationally.