US EPU (Monthly, Daily, Categorical)

Monthly EPU Index         Daily EPU Index          Categorical EPU

US Monthly EPU Index (1900-present)

Our monthly US EPU index reflects scaled frequency counts of articles in 10 leading newspapers (USA Today, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, and the WSJ). To construct the modern portion of the index (1985-present), we perform monthly searches of each paper for terms related to economic policy uncertainty. In particular, we search for articles containing the term 'uncertainty' or 'uncertain', the terms 'economic' or 'economy' and one or more of the following terms: 'congress', 'legislation', 'white house', 'regulation', 'federal reserve', or 'deficit'.

To deal with changes over time in the volume of articles for a given paper, we divide the raw count of policy uncertainty articles by the total number of articles in the same paper and month. We then normalize the resulting series for each paper to have a unit standard deviation from January 1985 through December 2009. Next, we sum the normalized values over papers in each month to obtain a multi-paper index. Finally, we re-normalize the multi-paper index to an average value of 101.8 from January 1985 through December 2009 (Note: a previous version normalized the series to a value of 100 in this time period but was adjusted slightly due to new data).

With each monthly update, data from the preceding two months may be revised slightly, as well. This is driven by the fact that some online newspapers do not immediately update their online archives with all articles, leading to slightly changing totals for the previous 1-2 months.

We extend this index back in time, from 1985 to 1900, using data from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and the Boston Globe. For this historical portion of the US EPU Index, we search for articles containing the term 'uncertainty' or 'uncertain', the terms 'economic', 'economy', 'business', 'commerce', 'industry', and 'industrial' as well as one or more of the terms: 'congress', 'legislation', 'white house', 'regulation', 'federal reserve', 'deficit', 'tariff', or 'war'. We then divide the counts of policy uncertainty articles by the total number of news articles containing terms regarding the economy or business in the paper.

US Daily EPU Index (1985-present)

The daily news-based Economic Policy Uncertainty Index is based on a broader set of newspapers derived from the Access World New's NewsBank service. While NewsBank has a wide range of news sources, from newspapers to magazines to newswire services, we conduct our analysis only utilizing US newspaper sources. These newspapers range from large national papers like USA Today to small local newspapers across the country.

We count the number of articles that contain at least one term from each of 3 sets of terms. The first set is economic or economy. The second is uncertain or uncertainty. The third set is legislation or deficit or regulation or congress or federal reserve or white house.

The number of newspapers that NewsBank covers over our sample period has drastically increased from under 100 in 1985 to over 2000 by 2020. To correct for this growth, we must normalize our index by the total number of newspaper articles.

Note that each day we update the data from the previous 30 days, so these data are subject to changes.

US Categorical EPU Data (1985-present)

The Categorical Data includes a range of sub-indexes based solely on news data. These are derived using results from the Access World News database of over 2,000 US newspapers. Each sub-index requires our economic, uncertainty, and policy terms as well as a set of categorical policy terms. For instance, articles that fulfill our requirements to be coded as EPU and also contain the term 'federal reserve' would be included in the monetary policy uncertainty sub-index. For a more detailed explanation, please visit the Categorical EPU page.

Legacy Three-Component US EPU Index (1985-present)

A legacy version of our US EPU Index includes two other components alongside our news-based series. The second component of this index draws on reports by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that compile lists of temporary federal tax code provisions. Temporary tax measures are a source of uncertainty for businesses and households because Congress often extends them at the last minute, undermining stability in and certainty about the tax code.

The third component of this policy-related uncertainty index draws on the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's Survey of Professional Forecasters. We measure dispersion in the individual-level data for three of the forecast variables directly influenced by government policy: CPI, purchases of goods and services by state and local governments, and purchases of goods and services by the federal government. For each series, we look at the quarterly forecasts for one year in the future. We chose these variables because they are directly influenced by monetary policy and fiscal policy actions.

To construct this three-component index of policy-related economy uncertainty, we first normalize each component by its own standard deviation prior to January 2012. We then compute the average value of the components, using weights of 1/2 on our broad news-based policy uncertainty index and 1/6 on each of our other three measures (the tax expirations index, the CPI forecast disagreement measure, and the federal/state/local purchases disagreement measure).