We propose a new instrument to identify uncertainty shocks in a SVAR model with external instruments. The instrument is constructed by exploiting variations in the price of gold around events that capture periods of changes in uncertainty. The variations in the price of gold around the events...

Investment fell sharply in the euro area after the financial crisis and has not yet returned to pre-crisis levels in many core economies. Focusing on the four largest euro-area countries, this paper investigates the role of uncertainty for investment dynamics. By doing so, we compare five...

This paper provides empirical evidence both at the aggregate and the micro level to demonstrate that the survey-based forecast dispersion series helps identify a different type of second moment shocks, which affect the distribution of firms' beliefs regardless of whether those beliefs are backed...

We identify fiscal impulses in the EU New Member States using four different methods and apply econometric panel data techniques to determine what is the response of the output and its components to those impulses. We also directly test the effects of fiscal impulses on labour costs and...

In this paper, we study an investment problem in which two asymmetric firms face competition and the regime characterizing economic conditions follows Markov switching. We derive the value functions and investment thresholds of a leader and a follower. One of the main results is that the equity...

This article makes a review of theoretical concepts and theories about culture in international business, since they are topics that can not be treated in isolation for the Colombian businessmen, and much less as independent topics. They are concomitant and interdependent elements. The...

Shadow banks play an important role in the modern financial system and are arguably the source of key vulnerabilities that led to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. I develop a quantitative framework with uncertainty fluctuations and endogenous bank default to study the dynamics of shadow banking....

This paper argues that uncertainty can lead to higher price volatility and persistent estimation errors in the housing market. Empirically, I construct a Household Sentiment Index (HSI) by applying the Case-Shiller repeat-sales estimation method to the households' survey responses in the Panel...

This paper develops a theory of sovereign debt crises driven by uncertainty shocks that are modeled as changes in investors' confidence in the macroeconomic fundamental of the economy. Due to defaultable government debt, uncertainty feeds into investors' beliefs about the fiscal sustainability...

The welfare cost of random consumption fluctuations is known from DeSantis (2007) to be increasing in the level of individual consumption risk in the economy. It is also known from Barillas et al. (2009) to increase if agents in the economy care about robustness to model misspecification. In...