Suchergebnisse

This paper estimates the impact on the US economy of four types of uncertainty about (i) government spending, (ii) tax changes, (iii) public debt sustainability and (iv) monetary policy. Following a one standard deviation shock, uncertainty about debt sustainability has the largest and most significant impact on real activity, with negative effects on output, consumption and investment after two years around 0.5%, 0.3% and 1.5% respectively. Uncertainty on the other economic policies has also detrimental consequences but these tend to be smaller and short-lived, especially for taxes and monetary policy. About 30% of output fluctuations are explained by policy uncertainty at most frequencies, with the lion's share accounted for by debt sustainability. Our results are based on a new empirical framework that allows the volatility of identified shocks to have a direct impact on the endogenous variables of an otherwise standard structural VAR.

AbstractWhy and when do firms deviate from target cash? And why do we observe imperfect adjustment of cash? I postulate and provide evidence that policy uncertainty induces financing frictions and adjustment costs, which decelerate the speed of adjustment (SOA) of cash toward target. I find that the effects of policy uncertainty on SOA are higher for firms that operate below target cash than for firms that operate above target cash. The results suggest that under policy uncertainty shocks, firms deviate from target cash as the expected benefit of deviation is greater than the expected value of approaching the target.

AbstractForecasting the economic policy uncertainty in Europe is of paramount importance given the ongoing sovereign debt crisis. This paper evaluates monthly economic policy uncertainty index forecasts and examines whether ultra‐high frequency information from asset market volatilities and global economic uncertainty can improve the forecasts relatively to the no‐change forecast. The results show that the global economic policy uncertainty provides the highest predictive gains, followed by the European and US stock market realized volatilities. In addition, the European stock market implied volatility index is shown to be an important predictor of the economic policy uncertainty.