Measuring and assessing economic uncertainty

Abstract

This paper evaluates the dynamic response of economic activity to shocks in agents’ perception of uncertainty. The study focuses on the comparison between manufacturers 'and consumers' perception of economic uncertainty. Since uncertainty is not directly observable, we approximate it using the geometric discrepancy indicator of Claveria et al. (2019). This approach allows us quantifying the proportion of disagreement in business and consumer expectations of eleven European countries and the Euro Area. First, we compute three independent indices of discrepancy corresponding to three dimensions of uncertainty (economic, inflation and employment) and we average them to obtain aggregate disagreement measures for businesses and for consumers (…)