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...

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...

This paper theoretically assesses the role that uncertainty plays in the intensity of conflicts. The standard two-player rent-seeking contest model (Tullock, 1980) is extended to allow for privately known subjective values of the prize. The conflict is modeled as a Bayesian game on which each...

The exact role that public perception of risks, and more in general public opinion and consumer concerns, may, and ought to, play in risk decision-making is one of the most challenging, yet little explored, issues under WTO law. How does the WTO take into account public perceptions and ensuing...

The anemic pace of the recovery of the U.S. economy from the Great Recession has frequently been blamed on heightened uncertainty, much of which concerns the nation's fiscal policy. Intuition suggests that increased policy uncertainty likely has different impacts on industries with different...

Many commentators argue that uncertainty about tax, spending, monetary and regulatory policy slowed the recovery from the 2007-2009 recession. To investigate this we develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU), built on three components: the frequency of newspaper references to...

We construct a new index of uncertainty — the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) — for 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1996 onwards. This is defined using the frequency of the word “uncertainty” in the quarterly Economist Intelligent Unit country reports. Globally, the...

We develop 50 novel indices of State-level Economic Policy Uncertainty (SEPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency using 204 million state newspaper articles from January 1990 to December 2019. We assess the validity of our measures. Our SEPU indices vary counter-cyclically with respect to...

This paper assesses the economics literature on policy uncertainty, addresses puzzles in that literature, and highlights pertinent empirical regularities. Although much progress has been made in identifying important correlations between uncertainty and economic activity, concerns about causal...

We consider several economic uncertainty indicators for the US and 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 growth, and...