Honors Thesis Archive

Author	Rachel Remias
Title	President Trump’s Tweets and their Effect on the Stock Market: The Relationship Between Social Media, Politics, and Emotional Economic Decision-Making
Department	Business & Political Science
Advisors	Ed Hasecke and Rachel Wilson
Year	2021
Honors	University Honors
Full Text	View Thesis (1170 KB)
Abstract	This paper analyzes the role of social media in politics through the lens of emotional economic decision-making and hypothesizes that Donald Trump’s short and impassioned tweets generate an instant emotional reaction from stockholders stemming from a sustained sense of uncertainty and anxiety about political and economic stability which results in immediate, but short-term, volatility within the stock market. This study categorizes Trump’s tweets based on high-level content to analyze whether short-term, intraday change in the S&P 500 responds more significantly to time-lag value indicators or the category of content of Trump’s tweets. A series of multiple linear regressions analyzing the relationship between minute-level intraday S&P 500 data and policy-related tweet content categorizations were run with results generally yielding little statistical significance. Despite a lack of substantiated results to support the overarching hypotheses, the prevalence of emotion in economic decision-making cannot be ignored.