Sweden Monthly EPU Index

Download Swedish EPU Data                  Download Annotated Slides

We are pleased to host a new index of economic policy uncertainty for Sweden developed by Hanna Armelius, Isaiah Hull and Hanna Stenbacka Köhler.

These researchers construct a monthly EPU index for Sweden following the methods in "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty" by Scott Baker, Nick Bloom and Steven J. Davis. To do so, they tap the National Library of Sweden's online archives for four major Swedish newspapers: Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens Industri, and Svenska Dagbladet.

For each newspaper, they query the archives to obtain monthly counts of articles that contain key Swedish terms pertaining to the economy, policy matters and uncertainty (U). Specifically, they count articles that contain ekonomi or ekonomisk (E) and riksbank, centralbank, regering, departement, or reglering (P) and osaker or oro (U). They allow for Swedish terms that contain one of these words as a root. Given the raw EPU article counts, they scale by the count of articles that satisfies the E criterion for the same newspaper and month. They then standardize each newspaper's scaled EPU frequency count to unit standard deviation from January 1985 to December 2009. Using the standardized, scaled EPU frequency counts, they average across the four papers by month to obtain their EPU index. In a final step, they multiplicatively rescale the index to a mean of 100 from January 1985 to December 2009.

You can find more information by reading "The Timing of Uncertainty Shocks in a Small Open Economy", Economics Letters, 155 (June), 31-34.