Martina Jasova

A reduction in lender of last resort (LOLR) policy uncertainty positively affects bank lending and propagates to investment and employment. We exploit a unique policy that reduced uncertainty regarding the availability of future LOLR funding for banks as a quasi-natural experiment. Using micro-level data on banks, firms and loans in Portugal, we generate cross-sectional variation in banks’ exposure to uncertainty and find that the size of the haircut subsidy, the gap between private market and central bank security valuations, plays a key role in the propagation of the shock to lending and the real economy.

George Alessandria

We study the effects on trade from the annual tariff uncertainty about China’s MFN status renewal prior to joining the WTO. We have three main findings. First, counter to the evidence elsewhere, trade increases strongly in anticipation of uncertain future increases in tariffs. Second, even though the trade response can be quite large, the probability of a tariff increase was perceived to be relatively small, with an average annual probability of non-renewal of about 5.5 percent. And third, what matters more is the expected future tariff rather than the uncertainty around it. We identify these effects using within-year variation in the risk of trade policy changes around the renewal vote and trade flows. We show that an (s,s) inventory model generates this behavior and that variation in the strength of the stockpiling in advance of the vote is increasing in the storability of goods. The model is also consistent with a sizeable fraction of the cross-industry variation in annual trade flows documented elsewhere. Our results explain why trade may hold up well in advance of a prospective policy change such as Brexit or the US escalating tariff war of 2018-19, but may fall off sharply even if expected tariff increases do not materialize.

Tarek Hassan

We construct new measures of country risk and sentiment as perceived by global investors and executives using textual analysis of the quarterly earnings calls of publicly listed firms around the world. Our quarterly measures cover 45 countries from 2002-2020. We use our measures to provide a novel characterization of country risk and to provide a harmonized definition of crises. We demonstrate that elevated perceptions of a country's riskiness are associated with significant falls in local asset prices and capital outflows, even after global financial conditions are controlled for. Increases in country risk are associated with reductions in firm-level investment and employment. We also show direct evidence of a novel type of contagion, where foreign risk is transmitted across borders through firm-level exposures. Exposed firms suffer falling market valuations and significantly retrench their hiring and investment in response to crises abroad. Finally, we provide direct evidence that heterogeneous currency loadings on global risk help explain the cross-country pattern of interest rates and currency risk premia.

Nicholas Bloom

We construct a new index of uncertainty, the World Uncertainty Index (WUI), for 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1996 onwards, and for 34 large advanced and emerging market economies from 1955. This is defined using the frequency of the word “uncertainty” in the quarterly Economist Intelligence Unit country reports. Globally, the Index spikes near the 9/11 attack, the SARS outbreak, the Gulf War II, the failure of Lehman Brothers, the Euro debt crisis, El Niño, the European border crisis, the UK Brexit vote, the 2016 US election and the recent US-China trade tensions. Uncertainty spikes tend to be more synchronized within advanced economies and between economies with tighter trade and financial linkages. The level of uncertainty is significantly higher in developing countries and is positively associated with economic policy uncertainty and stock market volatility, and negatively with GDP growth. In addition, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between uncertainty and democracy. In a panel vector autoregressive setting, we find that innovations in the WUI foreshadow significant declines in output. This effect varies across countries and across sectors within the same country: across countries, the effect is larger and more persistent in those with lower institutional quality; across sectors, the effect is stronger in those more financially constrained.