Uncertainty and Business Cycles: Exogenous Impulse or Endogenous Response?

Sydney C. Ludvigson, Sai Ma, Serena Ng

NBER Working Paper No. 21803
Issued in December 2015
NBER Program(s):   AP   EFG   ME

Uncertainty about the future rises in recessions. But is uncertainty a source of business cycle fluctuations or an endogenous response to them, and does the type of uncertainty matter? Answer: sharply higher uncertainty about real economic activity in recessions is fully an endogenous response to other shocks that cause business cycle fluctuations, while uncertainty about financial markets is a likely source of the fluctuations. Financial market uncertainty has quantitatively large negative consequences for several measures of real activity including employment, production, and orders. Such are the main conclusions drawn from estimation of three-variable structural vector autoregressions. To establish causal effects, we use information contained in external instruments that we construct in a novel way to be valid under credible interpretations of the structural shocks.