MCCC

Monthly aggregate and the four thematic clusters. Pick a series above; hover for the value. The daily file goes further, down to thirty topical subindices.

What it measures

Concern about climate change is not observable, so it has to be proxied. The Media Climate Change Concerns (MCCC) index does this from news: each climate-related article receives a concern score combining the level of risk and the sentiment it expresses, and the article-level scores are aggregated into a daily index that explicitly accounts for how much attention the media were paying to climate change at the time. Topical and thematic subindices are provided alongside the headline series.

The index is the empirical core of Climate change concerns and the performance of green versus brown stocks (Management Science), which shows that green stocks outperform brown stocks when concerns rise unexpectedly.

Coverage
Frequency Daily
Period January 2003 – June 2025
Region United States
Sources Ten major newspapers and two newswires (see version history)
Series Headline index, plus topical and thematic subindices
Format .xlsx, one sheet per vintage

Version history

The file ships all vintages, because published work relies on different ones. Cite the vintage you actually used.

Vintage Coverage Corpus Notes
1 — 2020 2003 – Jun 2018 8 newspapers The original National Bank of Belgium working-paper version. Kept for historical reproducibility.
2 — published 2003 – Jun 2018 10 newspapers + 2 newswires The version in the Management Science paper.
3 — 2023 update 2003 – Aug 2022 9 newspapers + 2 newswires Houston Chronicle dropped (access lost); alternative news aggregators used for some sources; LIWC2022 software with the LIWC2015 dictionary. Correlations with vintage 2 exceed 0.95 on the overlapping year.
4 — 2024 update 2003 – Jun 2024 unchanged No methodological change.
5 — 2025 update 2003 – Jun 2025 unchanged No methodological change.

The methodological break sits between vintages 2 and 3, and the table above records what changed. If your sample crosses mid-2018, pick your vintage accordingly.

How to cite

Ardia, D., Bluteau, K., Boudt, K., Inghelbrecht, K. (2023). Climate change concerns and the performance of green versus brown stocks. Management Science. doi:10.1287/mnsc.2022.4636

BibTeX is on the How to cite page.

Terms

Free for academic research. By downloading you agree to cite the reference above, to place https://sentometrics-research.com in a footnote so others can find the data, and to assume all risk associated with its use.

Download

Gzipped CSV, one header row, ISO 8601 dates. No decompression step needed:

read.csv(gzfile(url("https://sentometrics-research.com/data/mccc/mccc-2025-update-daily.csv.gz")))

See the folder README for every column, and what differs from the archived original.

Original as published — the file this is derived from, byte for byte: Sentometrics_US_Media_Climate_Change_Index.xlsx. It will move to a Zenodo deposit with a citable DOI.

Full licence