Climate Policy Uncertainty Index

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We are pleased to host the U.S Climate Policy Uncertainty (CPU) Index developed by Konstantinos Gavriilidis in "Measuring Climate Policy Uncertainty".

Gavriilidis follows the methodology in "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty" by Scott R. Baker, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis. To construct the Climate Policy Uncertainty index, he searches for articles in eight leading US newspapers containing the terms {"uncertainty" or "uncertain"} and {"carbon dioxide" or "climate" or "climate risk" or "greenhouse gas emissions" or "greenhouse" or "CO2" or "emissions" or "global warming" or "climate change" or "green energy" or "renewable energy" or "environmental"} and ("regulation" or "legislation" or "White House" or "Congress" or "EPA" or "law" or "policy"} (including variants such as "uncertainties", "regulatory", "policies", etc.) from April 1987 onwards. The eight newspapers are: Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, New York Times, Tampa Bay Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. For each newspaper, he scales the number of relevant articles per month with the total number of articles during the same month. Next, these eight series are standardized to have a unit standard deviation and then averaged across newspapers by month. Finally, the averaged series are normalized to have a mean value of 100 for the period April 1987 to August 2022.

The dataset should be cited as: Gavriilidis, K. (2021). Measuring Climate Policy Uncertainty. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3847388.