We construct a Climate Change News (CCN) index which measures attention to climate change risk for Japan, based on text information from newspaper articles. We compare our index with the original WSJ Climate Change News index of Engle et al. (2020) for the U.S. (WSJ-CCN index), as well as other measures of macroeconomic uncertainty. We find that the correlation between the CCN indexes of the U.S. and Japan is much higher than the correlation between the CCN index and other uncertainty measures in either of those countries. We also find that shocks to the CCN indexes have significantly negative effects on economic sentiment, but have ambiguous effects on industrial production. This contrasts with the fact that, for both the U.S. and Japan, other uncertainty shocks have negative effects on both economic sentiment and industrial production. As an application of the CCN indexes, we investigate if the effectiveness of monetary policy depends on the degree of attention to climate change risks.
Keywords: Climate Change; Text Analysis; Monetary Policy; Nonlinear Local Projection
Views expressed in the paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank of Japan or Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies.