A paper by Research Director Sota Kato shedding new light on political business cycles—a classical issue in economics and political science—has been published online in the Journal of Cloud Computing: Advances, Systems and Applications.

Co-authored with Takafumi Nakanishi, Budrul Ahsan, and Hirokazu Shimauchi, the paper applies a novel topic variation detection method to analyze a valuable-but-underutilized text dataset of the Japanese prime minister’s daily activities over the past three decades.

The method and dataset provide new insights, enabling the authors to overcome the empirical challenges encountered by previous research owing to the unobservability of the prime minister’s behavior.

“Time-Series Topic Analysis Using Singular Spectrum Transformation for Detecting Political Business Cycles,” Journal of Cloud Computing
https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1186/s13677-020-00197-4

Profile of Research Director Sota Kato
https://www.tkfd.or.jp/en/experts/detail.php?id=29