Economic Uncertainty and Divisive Politics: Evidence from the dos Españas

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Banco de Espana; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC); CSIC - Institut d'Analisi Economica (IAE); Barcelona School of Economics
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022050724000044
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 40-73
• 关键词: CONFLICT; VIOLENCE

摘要

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.