Macroeconomic Uncertainty and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Measure and Impacts on the Canadian Economy

Kevin Moran, Dalibor Stevanovic and Adam Abdel Kader Touré

CIRANO Working Papers from CIRANO

Abstract: This paper constructs a measure of Canadian macroeconomic uncertainty, by ap-plying the Jurado et al. (2015) method to the large database of Fortin-Gagnon et al.(2020). This measure reveals that the COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with a very sharp rise of macroeconomic uncertainty in Canada, confirming other results showing similar big increases in uncertainty in the United States and elsewhere. The paper then uses a structural VAR to compute the impacts on the Canadian economy of uncertainty shocks calibrated to match these recent increases. We show that such shocks lead to severe economic downturns, lower inflation and sizeable accommodating measures from monetary policy. Important distinctions emerge depending on whether the shock is interpreted as originating from US uncertainty –in which case the down-turn is deep but relatively short– or from specifically Canadian uncertainty, which leads to shallower but more protracted declines in economic activity.

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Uncertainty; Forecasting; Factors Models; Vector Autoregressions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C53 C55 E32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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https://cirano.qc.ca/files/publications/2020s-47.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Macroeconomic uncertainty and the COVID‐19 pandemic: Measure and impacts on the Canadian economy (2022)
Working Paper: Macroeconomic Uncertainty and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Measure and Impacts on the Canadian Economy (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cir:cirwor:2020s-47

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