We present evidence that referenda have a significant, detrimental outcome on investment. Employing an unsupervised machine learning algorithm over the period 2008-2017, we construct three important uncertainty indices underlying reports in the Scottish news media: Scottish independence...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of economic policy uncertainty on firms' investment decisions. We focus on Spain for the period 1998-2014. To measure policy-related uncertainty, we borrow the economic policy uncertainty (EPU) indicator available for this country. We find...

Multipliers estimated for sixteen major economies predict that 1% more economic policy uncertainty (EPU) produces about 0.3% - 0.8% more sovereign CDS volatility. The impact of EPU is strong but short-lived. US EPU is an important additional source of CDS volatility for European countries,...

We consider several economic uncertainty indicators for the United States and the UK before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: implied stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic policy uncertainty, twitter chatter about economic uncertainty, subjective uncertainty about future business...

Using causal graphs, this paper develops a simple check to uncover the direction of the causal link between economic policy uncertainty and stock market volatility. The check is applied to monthly data for 22 countries. The results imply that uncertainty is an instantaneous cause of stock market...

The news-based Economic Policy Uncertainty indices (EPU) of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom display discernible trends that can be found neither in other European countries nor in other uncertainty indicators. Therefore, we replicate the EPU index of European countries and show that...