MACROECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY AND MACROECONOMIC PERFORMANCE: ARE THEY RELATED?

Are Empirical Measures of Macroeconomic Uncertainty Alike?

This paper considers a plethora of time-series measures of uncertainty for inflation and real output growth, which are widely used in empirical studies. Their relative performances are compared to a benchmark measure using the uncertainty measure reported by individual forecasters in the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) for the period 1982-2008. The results show that the use of real-tim...

Global Macroeconomic Uncertainty

We measure global real and nominal macroeconomic uncertainty and analyze its impact on individual countries’ macroeconomic performance. Global uncertainty is measured through the conditional variances of global factors in inflation and output growth, estimated from a bivariate dynamic factor model with GARCH errors. The impact of global uncertainty is measured by including the conditional varia...

Macroeconomic Uncertainty and Firm Leverage

This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of nonfinancial firms’ leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm’s value maximization problem that predicts that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases the firm will decrease its optimal level of borrowing. We test this proposition using a panel of non–financial US firms drawn from the COMPUSTAT qua...

Macroeconomic Policy and Performance

What Are The Macroeconomic Effects of High-Frequency Uncertainty Shocks?∗

This paper evaluates the effects of high-frequency uncertainty shocks on a set of lowfrequency macroeconomic variables representative of the U.S. economy. Rather than estimating models at the same common low-frequency, we use recently developed econometric models, which allows us to deal with data of different sampling frequencies. We find that credit and labor market variables react the most t...