The Impact of Policy Uncertainty on Macro Variables – An SVAR-Based Empirical Analysis for EU Countries

Abstract In light of the rising political and economic uncertainty in Europe, we aim to provide a basic understanding of the impact of policy and stock market uncertainty on a set of macroeconomic variables such as production and investment. In this paper, we apply a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model to gain first insights that may help to identify avenues for further research. We find that stock market volatility shows a fairly consistently negative effect. However, the implications of policy uncertainty for Europe and the euro area in particular are not so straightforward.