Related papers: Measuring and assessing economic uncertainty
When agents' information is imperfect and dispersed, existing measures of macroeconomic uncertainty based on the forecast error variance have two distinct drivers: the variance of the economic shock and the variance of the information…
This paper examines the evolution of business and consumer uncertainty amid the coronavirus pandemic in 32 European countries and the European Union (EU).Since uncertainty is not directly observable, we approximate it using the geometric…
This paper constructs internationally consistent measures of macroeconomic uncertainty. Our econometric framework extracts uncertainty from revisions in data obtained from standardized national accounts. Applying our model to post-WWII…
Can uncertainty about credit availability trigger a slowdown in real activity? This question is answered by using a novel method to identify shocks to uncertainty in access to credit. Time-variation in uncertainty about credit availability…
In this paper we estimate a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with factor stochastic volatility in the error term to assess the effects of an uncertainty shock in the Euro area. This allows us to treat macroeconomic uncertainty as a…
We study the distributional implications of uncertainty shocks by developing a model that links macroeconomic aggregates to the US distribution of earnings and consumption. We find that: initially, the fraction of low-earning workers…
The Great Recession highlighted the role of financial and uncertainty shocks as drivers of business cycle fluctuations. However, the fact that uncertainty shocks may affect economic activity by tightening financial conditions makes…
The economic impacts of climate change are highly uncertain. Two of the most important uncertainties are the sensitivity of the climate system and the so-called damage functions, which relate climate change to economic damages and benefits.…
This paper investigates the time-varying impacts of international macroeconomic uncertainty shocks. We use a global vector autoregressive specification with drifting coefficients and factor stochastic volatility in the errors to model six…
No matter its source, financial- or policy-related, uncertainty can feed onto itself, inflicting the real economic sector, altering expectations and behaviours, and leading to identification challenges in empirical applications. The strong…
This article reviews the economics literature of, primarily, the last 20 years, that studies the link between income shocks and consumption fluctuations at the household level. We identify three broad approaches through which researchers…
Methods and applications are inextricably linked in science, and in particular in the domain of text-as-data. In this paper, we examine one such text-as-data application, an established economic index that measures economic policy…
In this paper, we explore the relationship between state-level household income inequality and macroeconomic uncertainty in the United States. Using a novel large-scale macroeconometric model, we shed light on regional disparities of…
We estimate the dynamic distributional effects of financial shocks in the Euro Area using survey-based microdata on personal incomes. We find that positive financial shocks increase inequality, with heterogeneity across different income…
This paper investigates how economic shocks propagate and amplify through the input-output network connecting industrial sectors in developed economies. We study alternative models of diffusion on networks and we calibrate them using…
Disagreement is an essential element of science and life in general. The language of probabilities and statistics is often used to describe disagreements quantitatively. In practice, however, we want much more than that. We want…
Uncertainty of scientific findings are typically reported through statistical metrics such as $p$-values, confidence intervals, etc. The magnitude of this objective uncertainty is reflected in the language used by the authors to report…
We propose a nonparametric method for estimating the distribution of consumer welfare from cross-sectional data with no restrictions on individual preferences. First demonstrating that moments of demand identify the curvature of the…
There are two reasons why uncertainty may not be adequately described by Probability Theory. The first one is due to unique or nearly-unique events, that either never realized or occurred too seldom for frequencies to be reliably measured.…
Studies of micro-level price datasets find more frequent small price increases than decreases, which can be explained by consumer inattention because time-constrained shoppers might ignore small price changes. Recent empirical studies of…