This paper provides new evidence about the link between firm level total factor productivity (TFP) and stock returns. We estimate firm level TFP and show that it is strongly related to several firm characteristics such as size, the book to market ratio, investment, and hiring rate. Low...

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...

We use novel data on firm-level attention to characterize firms’ exposures to uncertainty. Our data captures a daily cross-section of firm-employee reading across thousands of topics. We use natural language processing tools to assess the types of topics firms are reading and show that firms...

This paper argues that the capacity of financial markets to aggregate dispersed information about economic conditions is diminished in times of distress, resulting in countercyclical uncertainty. Building on a rational expectations equilibrium dynamic environment, I model informed traders as...

The concepts of potential growth and the output gap are important components in assessing the business cycle and productive capacity of an economy. However, being unobservable, these measures must be estimated. The Fiscal Compact will result in these concepts being used to judge EU member states...

This paper studies the role of confidence in the transmission of uncertainty shocks during U.S. recessions. I use smooth-transition VAR to examine the regime-dependent effect of uncertainty shocks, and a counterfactual decomposition to isolate the role of confidence when the economy is in...

Entrepreneurs' exposure to economic uncertainty from regulation, monetary policy, and taxation is exacerbated by the inflexibility of capital asset commitments. Entrepreneurs adapt to uncertainty by reducing asset specificity. While the mainstream approach tends to focus on reduced aggregate...

Uncertainty has recently become a major concern for policymakers and academics. Spikes in uncertainty are often associated with recessions and have detrimental effects on the aggregate economy. This paper analyzes the effects of uncertainty on firms' hiring and investment decisions, both...

We analyze the relationship between uncertainty and economic growth expectations in Mexico through the Growth at Risk methodology. Our analysis consists of two stages: first, we estimate a quantile regression of annual output growth conditional on lagged values of a measure of macroeconomic...