One of the most popular measures of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) is an index based on newspapers coverage of particular keywords. The constructed index is often then included in VAR models to examine the extent to which EPU affects economic activity. Researchers, however, have not...

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...

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....

Measures of bilateral political relations are typically long-memory (fractionally integrated) processes. Appropriate inference and interpretation of this property hinges on the underlying reasons behind it. There are three possible explanations: (i) mechanical aggregation, (ii) bilateral...