Measuring Global and Country-Specific Uncertainty

Download or read book Measuring Global and Country-Specific Uncertainty written by Ezgi O. Ozturk and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motivated by the literature on the capital asset pricing model, we decompose the uncertainty of a typical forecaster into common and idiosyncratic uncertainty. Using individual survey data from the Consensus Forecasts over the period of 1989-2014, we develop monthly measures of macroeconomic uncertainty covering 45 countries and construct a measure of global uncertainty as the weighted average of country-specific uncertainties. Our measure captures perceived uncertainty of market participants and derives from two components that are shown to exhibit strikingly different behavior. Common uncertainty shocks produce the large and persistent negative response in real economic activity, whereas the contributions of idiosyncratic uncertainty shocks are negligible.