Data
Irish Economic Policy Uncertainty data
This page provides the data that underpin my work on Irish economic policy uncertainty, including the paper Economic Policy Uncertainty Shocks in Small Open Economies: A Case Study of Ireland.
The series are hosted externally by the Economic Policy Uncertainty project and are mirrored here for convenience.
Download
Download the Ireland Economic Policy Uncertainty dataset (Excel)
What is in the file
The Excel file contains monthly observations with three columns.
Date
Month identifier (recorded as the first day of each month).Ireland_main_epu
A newspaper-based index of Irish Economic Policy Uncertainty.Ireland_domestic_epu
An orthogonal domestic component of Irish EPU, constructed by purging the main series of its global component (see the construction notes below).
Construction overview
Following the newspaper-based approach in Baker, Bloom and Davis (2016), I construct a monthly measure of Irish Economic Policy Uncertainty from January 1982 onwards using newspaper archives from two leading Irish newspapers, The Irish Times and the Irish Independent.
The index is built from a keyword search that identifies articles containing terms related to uncertainty, the economy, and policy. Monthly article counts are scaled by the total number of articles in each month and then standardised.
To separate domestic from global influences, I estimate a global component of policy uncertainty using principal components analysis and then obtain an orthogonal Irish domestic series via regression.
Chart
Paper and documentation
Suggested citation
If you use these data, please cite the journal article as follows: Rice, Jonathan (2023). “Economic Policy Uncertainty Shocks in Small Open Economies: A Case Study of Ireland”. The Economic and Social Review, 54(4), 217-245.