We study an investment experiment conducted with a representative sample of German households. Respondents invest in a safe asset and a risky asset whose return is tied to the German stock market. Experimental investments correlate with beliefs about stock market returns and exhibit desirable...

We explore the various arguments for and against the recommendation that younger households should invest a larger share of their pension wealth in risky assets. The ability of young agents to compensate their financial losses by saving more during their career provides the strongest argument in...

Using firm and industry data, we establish two facts: (i) Uncertainty about demand conditions not only reduces export sales and exporting probabilities but also makes exports less sensitive to trade policy; (ii) the most productive exporters are more affected by higher industry-wide expenditure...

Suppose that a group of agents having divergent expectations can share risks efficiently. We examine how this group should behave collectively to manage these risks. We show that the beliefs of the representative agent is in general a function of the group.s wealth level, or equivalently, that...

In this paper we offer an analysis of the effects of uncertainty about future tax policy on irreversible investment. The main message of the paper is that investment is not much affected by the degreee of tax policy uncertainty. This is true regardless of whether random tax changes are...

A large literature suggests that the expected equity risk premium is countercyclical. Using a variety of different measures for this risk premium, we document that it also exhibits growth asymmetry, i.e. the risk premium rises sharply in recessions and declines much more gradually during the...

We apply generalized beta and triangular distributions to histograms from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) to estimate forecast uncertainty, shocks and discord using information framework, and compare these with moment-based estimates. We find these two approaches to produce...

This survey features three parts. The first one covers the recent literature on domestic (i.e., country-specific) uncertainty and offers ten main takeaways. The second part reviews contributions on the fast-growing strand of the literature focusing on the macroeconomic effects of uncertainty...

How does economic uncertainty affect the impact of tax policy? We exploit a natural experiment in which two very similar investment subsidies were implemented in the same country, two years apart: once during a period of economic stability, and once during a period of very high uncertainty....

We analyze a psychologically-based model of voter turnout in an election with common value and uncertainty. Our model yields distinctive comparative statics results. First, an increase in the proportion of informed citizens may cause the winning margin for the right candidate to either rise or...