Economic Uncertainty and Divisive Politics: Evidence from the dos Españas

This is the replication package for "Economic Uncertainty and Divisive Politics: Evidence from the dos Españas" (Sandra García-Uribe, Hannes Mueller, and Carlos Sanz), Journal of Economic History, 2023.<br><br>This article exploits two newspaper archives to track economic policy uncertainty in Spain in 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.<br><br>Please, use the Readme.txt file with the full description of the replication package.