We construct a time series of political party ideology, based on Poole and Rosenthal's (1997) NOMINATE scores, for the 1950-98 period. The results show that (1) party ideology has become increasingly more polarized over this period; and (2) that it is very sensitive to business cycle conditions....

This paper decomposes government spending into its temporary and permanent components using Baker’s et. al. economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in a bivariate SVAR setting with long-run constraints, a la Blanchard and Quah (1989). To illustrate the applicability of the bivariate moving average...