We tackle two questions in this paper: In the sovereign debt crisis, what moves the euro area inflation outlook and has the firm anchoring of medium to long-term inflation expectations been touched? Deriving densities from a new data set on options on the euro area harmonized index of consumer prices provides us with the full distribution of inflation expectations. The daily data set allows us ...

In this paper we investigate the link between optimal level of leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. Using the model of firm’s value maximization, we show that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases, captured by an increase in the variability of industrial production or inflation, firms decrease their optimal levels of borrowing. We test this prediction on a panel of non–financial US firms dr...

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...