This paper deals with three aspects of spectacular oil price episodes such as the one witnessed in 2008. First, the concept of temporary explosiveness is proposed as an empirical method for capturing this type of behavior. The application of a recently proposed recursive unit root test shows...

We study business uncertainty in high- versus low-volatility environments by surveying over 31,000 managers across 41 countries. We elicit subjective probability distributions for future own-firm sales and measure firm-level uncertainty with their mean absolute deviations. Analogously, we...