Using U.S. data from 1926 to 2015, I show that financial skewness?a measure comparing cross-sectional upside and downside risks of the distribution of stock market returns of financial firms?is a powerful predictor of business cycle fluctuations. I then show that shocks to financial skewness are...

I empirically investigate the economic effects of uncertainty about the performance of financial firms. More specifically, I focus on the simple standard deviation of stock market returns across financial firms at every quarter, referring to this measure as financial volatility. First, I show...