Can we use newspapers to predict job creation?

Abstract

Newspapers report about new investments in the country, new firm's creation and national programs that aim to promote job creation. Using this information can help us predict and acknowledge about a part of job creation and better inform universities about developing sectors. However, most prior work focuses on predicting stock market movements using newspapers and overlooks job creation. In this paper, we want to investigate whether newspapers could predict the job market future needs in term of workforce. Therefore, we collect newspapers found online and job creation in 18 sectors. We use linear mixed models for longitudinal data and random forest to predict job creation in those sectors based on sector mentions in the newspapers articles. Our findings suggest that newspapers can contribute to our ability to understand the near future job creation by leveraging sector mentions in the newspapers for specific sectors. Moreover, our results show that we can approximately predict future job creation in the 18 sectors by predicting the number of job creation in those sectors.