EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A global economic policy uncertainty index from principal component analysis

Peng-Fei Dai, Xiong Xiong and Wei-Xing Zhou

Finance Research Letters, 2021, vol. 40, issue C

Abstract: This paper constructs a global economic policy uncertainty index through the principal component analysis of the economic policy uncertainty indices for twenty primary economies around the world. We find that the PCA-based global economic policy uncertainty index is a good proxy for the economic policy uncertainty on the global scale, which is quite consistent with the GDP-weighted global economic policy uncertainty index. The PCA-based economic policy uncertainty index is found to be positively related with the volatility and correlation of the global financial market, which indicates that the stock markets are more volatile and correlated when the global economic policy uncertainty is higher. The PCA-based global economic policy uncertainty index (T=24) performs slightly better because the relationships between the PCA-based uncertainty and market volatility and between the PCA-based uncertainty and market correlation are more significant.

Keywords: Econophysics; Economic policy uncertainty; Principal component analysis; Volatility; Correlation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D80 E66 G18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1544612319310542
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: A global economic policy uncertainty index from principal component analysis (2019) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:finlet:v:40:y:2021:i:c:s1544612319310542

DOI: 10.1016/j.frl.2020.101686

Access Statistics for this article

Finance Research Letters is currently edited by R. Gençay

More articles in Finance Research Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-07
Handle: RePEc:eee:finlet:v:40:y:2021:i:c:s1544612319310542