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 quarterly post-WWII real-time data, we estimate macroeconomic...

This paper studies the dynamic effects of an uncertainty shock on firm expectations. We conduct a survey that confronts managers from a representative firm sample with a model-consistent uncertainty shock scenario. An exogenous increase in uncertainty significantly reduces managers' expected...

Business Tendency Surveys (BTS) continue to be an important source of timely information on business cycles in many countries. We address quality of economic survey data by uncovering the relation between unit non-response and participant characteristics on company respectively respondent level....

Knightian Uncertainty represents a situation in which it is no longer possible to form expectations about future events. We propose the first method to directly measure Knightian Uncertainty. Our approach relies on firm-level data and measures the share of firms that are not able to formalize...

Does increased policy uncertainty dampen investment plans of firms? We provide direct evidence on this question by examining the effects of an unexpectedly accepted and far reaching referendum in Switzerland in February 2014. The vote has put several economically relevant agreements between...

This paper analyzes the effects of macroeconomic shocks on prices and output at different levels of aggregation using a bottom up approach. We show how to generate firm level impulse responses by incorporating experimental settings into surveys and by exposing firm executives to treatment...

We estimate demand, supply, monetary, investment and financial shocks in a VAR identified with a minimum set of sign restrictions on US data. We find that financial shocks are major drivers of fluctuations in output, stock prices and investment but have a limited effect on inflation. In a second...