This paper examines the correlation between uncertainty and real GDP growth. We use the volatility of real GDP growth from a VAR, stock market volatility, survey-based forecast dispersion, and the index from Jurado et al. (2015) as proxies for uncertainty. In each case, a stronger negative...

Uncertainty about the economy increased when the Fed reduced the federal funds rate to its effective lower bound because the constraint restricted the Fed's ability to stabilize the economy. As a result, a much stronger negative relationship between uncertainty and economic activity emerged...

This paper uses a battery of calibrated and estimated structural models to determine the causal drivers of the negative correlation between output and aggregate uncertainty. We find the transmission of uncertainty shocks to output is weak, while aggregate uncertainty endogenously responds to...

Macroeconomic uncertainty—the conditional volatility of the unforecastable component of a future value of a time series—shows considerable variation in the data. A typical assumption in business cycle models is that production is Cobb-Douglas. Under that assumption, this paper shows there is...