Many commentators argue that uncertainty about tax, spending, monetary and regulatory policy slowed the recovery from the 2007-2009 recession. To investigate this we develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU), built on three components: the frequency of newspaper references to...

Globalization drives the need to properly understand policy uncertainty and how it affects both the economy in general and business conditions. To systematically investigate the effect of policy uncertainty on small, open economies, we develop a policy uncertainty index based on newspaper...

We construct a new index of uncertainty — the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) — for 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1996 onwards. This is defined using the frequency of the word “uncertainty” in the quarterly Economist Intelligent Unit country reports. Globally, the...

We create a newspaper-based Equity Market Volatility (EMV) tracker that moves with the VIX and with the realized volatility of returns on the S&P 500. Parsing the underlying text, we find that 72 percent of EMV articles discuss the Macroeconomic Outlook, and 44 percent discuss Commodity Markets....

I investigate the dynamics of analyst forecast errors relative to economic policy uncertainty and find a significant positive relation between economic policy uncertainty and analyst forecast errors. A doubling of economic policy uncertainty is associated with a 4.29 percentage points increase...