Ireland Monthly Index (Zalla)

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We are pleased to host a new index of economic policy uncertainty for Ireland developed by Ryan Zalla.

Zalla constructs an EPU index for Ireland based on frequency counts of articles in The Irish Times, the only Irish newspaper with publicly accessible archives from January 1985 onwards. As detailed in his paper on "Economic Policy Uncertainty in Ireland," Zalla follows the methods in "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty" by Scott Baker, Nick Bloom and Steven J. Davis.

Specifically, he first counts the number of articles each month in The Irish Times that contain "uncertainty" or "uncertain", "economic" or "economy" and one or more of the following policy-relevant terms: regulation, legislation, Dáil, deficit, government, "central bank" or Taoiseach. To obtain an EPU rate, he scales the raw monthly EPU count by the number of all articles published in The Irish Times in the same month. He then standardizes the data to unit standard deviation from January 1985 to August 2016 and multiplicatively rescales the resulting series to a mean value of 100 over the same time period.

Zalla thanks Michael Curran, Daniel Eliades, Scott Dressler, Christopher Kilby, Victor Li, and Peter Zaleski for their support and valuable feedback on both the research paper and preliminary version of the EPU Index for Ireland.

A more thorough description of the index can be found here: Download Paper