CIES Head of Research, Professor Joëlle Noailly and PhD candidates Laura Nowzohour and Matthias van den Heuvel have developed a new Environmental Policy index for the United States. In a new CIES Research Brief 9, they outline their findings:

"We introduce a novel index measuring the salience of US environmental policy over the 1981-2019 period on a monthly basis and on various sub-topics. The index captures the evolution of the relative share of news articles discussing environmental and climate regulations over the last four decades. Our analysis finds a meaningful empirical association between more news on environmental policy and growing opportunities for clean investments."  

These indices, built using machine learning techniques, represent the share of articles about environmental policy in ten large newspapers: the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Herald, Tampa Bay Times, San Jose Mercury News and San Diego Union Tribune.

The index is part of their SNF - NRP73 research project Financing Investments in Clean Technologies and can be accessed on their project website.