Recent theoretical work in the economics of climate change has suggested that climate policy is highly sensitive to "fat-tailed" risks of catastrophic outcomes (Weitzman, 2009b). Such risks are suggested to be an inevitable consequence of scientific uncertainty about the effects of increased...

Consider legal uncertainty as uncertainty about the legality of a specific action. In particular, suppose that the threshold of legality is uncertain. I show that this legal uncertainty raises welfare. Legal uncertainty changes deterrence in opposite directions. The probability of conviction...

The paper examines the monetary-fiscal interactions in a monetary union model with uncertainty due to imperfect central bank transparency. We first show that monetary uncertainty disciplines fiscal policymakers and thereby reduces taxes, average inflation and output distortions. However, as more...

The paper analyzes under what circumstances policymakers experiment with policies with uncertain outcomes, when they prefer to imitate policies initiated in other countries, and when they prefer to coordinate policies internationally. Policymakers have private costs of active policies and...

We leverage the small open economy Switzerland as a testing ground for basic premises of macroeconomic models of endogenous information acquisition, using tailored surveys of firms and households. First, we show that firms perceive a greater exposure to exchange rate movements than households,...

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...

We analyse the extent to which firm-level uncertainty is affected by aggregate uncertainty. Firm-level uncertainty is constructed from a large and monthly panel dataset of manufacturing firms. We find that aggregate uncertainty has a positive and robust impact on firm-level uncertainty. This...