Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This paper studies the effects of anticipations of tax changes on economic activity through the release of tax news in the media in the United States. I provide a measure of anticipations by exploiting the content of television news. This information typically flows faster than standard measures of gross domestic product, thus I propose a mixed frequency dynamic factor model to estimate both the economic activity latent factor and the effects of anticipated tax shocks on it. I find that one-month-ahead anticipations of tax cuts significantly stimulate current economic activity while those of tax increases produce the opposite effect.

This article exploits two newspaper archives to track economic policy uncertainty in Spain from 1905–1945. We find that the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 was anticipated by a striking upward level shift of uncertainty in both newspapers. We study the reasons for this shift through a natural language processing method, which allows us to leverage expert opinion to track specific issues in our newspaper archives. We find a strong empirical link between increasing uncertainty and the rise of divisive political issues like socio-economic conflict. This holds even when exploiting content differences between the two newspapers in our corpus.

Este artículo utiliza las hemerotecas de dos periódicos para estimar el índice de incertidumbre sobre las políticas económicas —Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU)—en España en 1905-1945, un período de gran polarización política. Encontramos que el estallido de la Guerra Civil en 1936 fue anticipado por un sorprendente aumento del nivel de incertidumbre en ambos periódicos. Estudiamos la dinámica presente detrás de este aumento y aportamos evidencia de una fuerte asociación empírica entre el incremento de la incertidumbre y la mayor relevancia de los asuntos políticos divisivos en ese momento: conflicto socioeconómico, separatismo regional, poder militar y papel de la Iglesia. Estos resultados se mantienen incluso cuando utilizamos variación en contenido a nivel de periódico. ; This article exploits two newspaper archives to track economic policy uncertainty in Spain in 1905-1945, a period of extreme political polarization. We find that the outbreak of the civil war in 1936 was anticipated by a striking upward level shift of uncertainty in both newspapers. We study the dynamics behind this shift and provide evidence of a strong empirical link between increasing uncertainty and the rise of divisive political issues at the time: socio-economic conflict, regional separatism, power of the military, and role of the church. This holds even when we exploit variation in content at the newspaper level.