We consider several economic uncertainty indicators for the United States and the UK before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: implied stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic policy uncertainty, twitter chatter about economic uncertainty, subjective uncertainty about future business...

We develop a new monthly panel survey of business executives and a new question design that elicits subjective probability distributions over own-firm outcomes at a one-year lookahead horizon. Our Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) began in 2014 and now covers 1,500 firms drawn from all 50...

We show how real and financial frictions amplify, prolong and propagate the impact of uncertainty shocks. We first use a novel instrumentation strategy to address endogeneity in estimating the impact of uncertainty, by exploiting differential firm exposure to exchange rate, policy, treasury, and...