The convention in the news media is to announce a recession if a country experiences two consecutive quarters of negative growth. We exploit the arbitrary threshold implied by this practice to identify the economic impact of recession announcements through a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD). Estimation results show that news of a recession leads to a discontinuous fall in consumer confidence, consumption growth and final estimates of GDP growth in a panel of countries. The effect is large, robust and statistically significant.

中文翻译：

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经济衰退公告的经济影响

新闻媒体的惯例是，如果一个国家连续两个季度出现负增长，就会宣布经济衰退。我们利用这种做法隐含的任意阈值，通过回归不连续性设计 (RDD) 来确定经济衰退公告的经济影响。估计结果显示，经济衰退的消息会导致一组国家的消费者信心、消费增长和 GDP 增长的最终估计出现不连续下降。效果大、稳健且具有统计显着性。