Real-time Monitoring of Economic Shocks using Company Websites

Understanding the effects of economic shocks on firms is critical for analyzing economic growth and resilience. We introduce a Web-Based Affectedness Indicator (WAI), a general-purpose tool for real-time monitoring of economic disruptions across diverse contexts. By leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) assisted classification and information extraction on texts from over five million company websites, WAI quantifies the degree and nature of firms' responses to external shocks. Using the COVID-1...