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A Century of Economic Policy Uncertainty Through the French-Canadian Lens

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  • David Ardia
  • Keven Bluteau
  • Alaa Kassem

Abstract

A novel token-distance-based triple approach is proposed for identifying EPU mentions in textual documents. The method is applied to a corpus of French-language news to construct a century-long historical EPU index for the Canadian province of Quebec. The relevance of the index is shown in a macroeconomic nowcasting experiment.

Suggested Citation

  • David Ardia & Keven Bluteau & Alaa Kassem, 2021. "A Century of Economic Policy Uncertainty Through the French-Canadian Lens," Papers 2106.05240, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2021.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2106.05240
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Jushan Bai & Serena Ng, 2002. "Determining the Number of Factors in Approximate Factor Models," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(1), pages 191-221, January.
    2. Olivier Fortin‐Gagnon & Maxime Leroux & Dalibor Stevanovic & Stéphane Surprenant, 2022. "A large Canadian database for macroeconomic analysis," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 55(4), pages 1799-1833, November.
    3. Scott R. Baker & Nicholas Bloom & Steven J. Davis, 2016. "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 131(4), pages 1593-1636.
    4. Ghirelli, Corinna & Pérez, Javier J. & Urtasun, Alberto, 2019. "A new economic policy uncertainty index for Spain," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 182(C), pages 64-67.
    5. Dario Caldara & Matteo Iacoviello & Patrick Molligo & Andrea Prestipino & Andrea Raffo, 2019. "Does Trade Policy Uncertainty Affect Global Economic Activity?," FEDS Notes 2019-09-04, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    6. Hui Zou & Trevor Hastie, 2005. "Addendum: Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 67(5), pages 768-768, November.
    7. Donadelli, Michael & Gufler, Ivan & Pellizzari, Paolo, 2020. "The macro and asset pricing implications of rising Italian uncertainty: Evidence from a novel news-based macroeconomic policy uncertainty index," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 197(C).
    8. Hui Zou & Trevor Hastie, 2005. "Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 67(2), pages 301-320, April.
    9. Ardia, David & Bluteau, Keven & Boudt, Kris, 2019. "Questioning the news about economic growth: Sparse forecasting using thousands of news-based sentiment values," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(4), pages 1370-1386.
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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C43 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Index Numbers and Aggregation
    • C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Prediction Models; Simulation Methods
    • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
    • E60 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - General

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