The World Uncertainty Index

Hites Ahir, Nicholas Bloom and Davide Furceri

No 29763, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We construct the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) for an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952. This is the frequency of the word “uncertainty” in the quarterly Economist Intelligence Unit country reports. Globally, the Index spikes around major events like the Gulf War, the Euro debt crisis, the Brexit vote and the COVID pandemic. The level of uncertainty is higher in developing countries but is more synchronized across advanced economies with their tighter trade and financial linkages. In a panel vector autoregressive setting we find that innovations in the WUI foreshadow significant declines in output. This effect is larger and more persistent in countries with lower institutional quality, and in sectors with greater financial constraints.

JEL-codes: E0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cwa, nep-fdg, nep-ifn and nep-mac
Note: AP EFG ITI ME POL PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (108)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29763.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The world uncertainty index (2022)
Working Paper: The world uncertainty index (2022)
Working Paper: The world uncertainty index (2022)
Working Paper: The world uncertainty index (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29763

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29763

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().