Hope, change, and the financial markets: Can Obama's public speeches drive the U.S. Stock Market

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Economics from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Barack Obama arose as President of the United States of America during a financial crisis, that has harmed everyone. While he talked of hope and change, the media praised his rhetoric. This paper proposes a methodology based on word occurrence and manual content analysis to analyse whether his public speeches drive the financial markets. The econometric evidence suggests that even though his speeches per se do not have an impact on the markets, some of his specific oratorical features do. This impact is visible both on contemporaneous daily returns and on cumulative (three days and seven days) returns.