Economic Uncertainty and Divisive Politics: Evidence from the dos Españas

Sandra García-Uribe, Hannes Mueller and Carlos Sanz

The Journal of Economic History, 2024, vol. 84, issue 1, 40-73

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2024
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Working Paper: Economic uncertainty and divisive politics: evidence from the dos Españas (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:jechis:v:84:y:2024:i:1:p:40-73_2

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