We quantify and study state-level economic policy uncertainty. Tapping digital archives for nearly 3,500 local … newspapers, we construct three monthly indexes for each state: one that captures state and local sources of policy uncertainty … uncertainty much more than the average election. The COVID-19 pandemic drove huge increases in policy uncertainty and unemployment …

We examine several measures of uncertainty to make five points. First, equity market traders and executives at … nonfinancial firms have shared similar assessments about one-year-ahead uncertainty since the pandemic struck. Both the one …-year VIX and our survey-based measure of firm-level uncertainty at a one-year forecast horizon doubled at the onset of the …