ABSTRACT
This chapter presents descriptive results, econometric results, and a detailed discussion concerning the robustness and validity of the different findings. Before the econometric analysis, some descriptive statistics can provide an overview of the scope and nature of the bibliometric data and, very broadly, how they relate to business cycles and economic crises. One of the few terms which follow the expected pattern is 'depression'. With the exception of annual averages anywhere in 'depression' featured more frequently during contractions than outside of them. Also similarly, and quite uniformly across categories and averages, 'distress', 'embarrassment' and 'panic' display higher frequencies during contraction years than outside of them. An intuitive potential explanation for these observations considers publication lag. If an economic crisis sparks respective discussions, then the articles responding to these events need to be written first and then pass through the peer-review and publication process, which can easily take more than a year.
