Results

CEP discussion paper

International trade in an uncertain world

We develop a tractable quantitative model of international trade in which agents make bilateral investments in resilience under general equilibrium uncertainty. Under both complete and incomplete financial markets, we sh...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Tariff confusion

US trade policy in 2025 was unprecedented in the frequency, complexity and volatility of tariff announcements. This paper presents evidence that the resulting policy environment reduced trade flows because of confusion o...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The impact of the 2025 US tariff announcements on UK firms

In the first half of 2025, the US and some of its trading partners announced significant changes to import tariffs. This column uses newly designed questions to study the impact of these changes on UK firms and to assess...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

Using disasters to estimate the impact of uncertainty

Uncertainty rises in recessions and falls in booms. But what is the causal relationship? We construct cross-country panel data on stock market returns to proxy for first- and second-moment shocks and instrument these wit...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of International Economics:

Sequentially exporting products across countries

Exploiting disaggregated data on French exporters, we show that firms expand their product scope and geographical presence sequentially. This process of internationalization is uneven over time, exhibiting more volatilit...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Tracking uncertainty in a rapidly changing global economic outlook

Tracking uncertainty at a high frequency is useful in the context of the multiple shocks that have hit the global economy over the past years and to disentangle the sources of uncertainty. This column presents a new mont...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Econometrics:

Surveying business uncertainty

We elicit subjective probability distributions from business executives about their own-firm outcomes at a one-year look-ahead horizon. In terms of question design, our key innovation is to let survey respondents freely ...Read more...

Journal article

Annual Review of Economics:

Expecting Brexit

The Brexit vote precipitated the unraveling of the United Kingdom's membership in the world's deepest economic integration agreement. This article reviews evidence on the realized economic effects of Brexit. The 2016 Bre...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Risk and Financial Management:

Pandemic-era uncertainty

We examine several measures of uncertainty to make five points. First, equity market traders and executives at nonfinancial firms have shared similar assessments about one-year-ahead uncertainty since the pandemic struck...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Trade disruptions in the wake of Brexit

A dramatic fall in the value of UK imports from the European Union relative to the rest of the world occurred when the post-Brexit Trade and Cooperation Agreement came into effect. What's more, according to research by R...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

UK trade in the wake of Brexit

This paper studies the impact of Brexit on the UK's trade with the EU relative to its trade with the rest of the world. We find no evidence that uncertainty and anticipation effects led to a significant decline in relati...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

The impact of the war in Ukraine on economic uncertainty

Economists review the effects of the war in Ukraine, identifying where and to what extent measures of economic uncertainty have increased....Read more...

Journal article

International Economic Review:

The Brexit vote, inflation and UK living standards

This article studies how voting for Brexit affected living standards in the United Kingdom. Using heterogeneity in exposure to import costs across product groups, we analyze how the depreciation of sterling caused by the...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Covid-19 uncertainty: a tale of two tails

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a massive spike in uncertainty. This column uses data from panel surveys of US and UK business executives to document how uncertainty over own-firm sales growth rates over the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Sequential exporting across countries and products

How do exporters expand their product scope and geographical presence? We argue that new exporters are uncertain about their profitability in different countries and products, but learn it as they start to export. As a c...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Why global uncertainty is declining

The latest update of the World Uncertainty Index indicates that global uncertainty has fallen back to its long-run average after reaching a historical high in 2020. This column describes how this is driven by a significa...Read more...

Journal article

American Journal of Agricultural Economics:

Rainfall variability, child labor, and human capital accumulation in rural Ethiopia

How does income uncertainty affect human capital investments in agrarian economies? Using child-level panel data, I exploit a medium-run change in mean-preserving rainfall variability to identify the effects of income un...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economics and Statistics:

Trade and uncertainty

We offer a new explanation as to why international trade is so volatile in response to economic shocks. Our approach combines the idea of uncertainty shocks with international trade. Firms order inputs from home and fore...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Who becomes an inventor in America? The importance of exposure to innovation

We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in the United States, focusing on the role of inventive ability (?nature?) versus environment (?nurture?). Using deidentified data on 1.2 million invento...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Come together: firm boundaries and delegation

We jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them by confronting an incomplete-contracts model with data on vertical integration and delegation for thousands of firms around the world. In...Read more...

CEP Brexit analysis

The Brexit vote, inflation and UK living standards

The vote to leave the European Union (EU) was an unanticipated shock to the UK economy that increased uncertainty and reduced the country?s expected future openness to trade, investment and immigration with the EU. Our r...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Measuring economic policy uncertainty

We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence-including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles-indicate that our index proxies for movem...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

No one would be spared: how the costs of Brexit would be distributed across households

That leaving the EU would damage the overall economy is now being treated as more of a fact than a speculation. But those for Brexit argue that the rich will be negatively affected while the poor will benefit. This is no...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring economic policy uncertainty

We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence ? including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles ? indicate that our index proxies for m...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Consumption smoothing and the welfare cost of uncertainty

How does income uncertainty affect individual well-being? Combining individual-level panel data from rural Ethiopia with high-resolution meteorological data, we estimate that mean-preserving increases in rainfall variabi...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Long shadow of the Berlin Wall

Do people born at different points of the economic cycle have different outcomes ? and if so, why? Arnaud Chevalier and Olivier Marie examine the educational attainment and criminal activity of children born in East Germ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and uncertainty

We offer a new explanation as to why international trade is so volatile in response to economic shocks. Our approach combines the uncertainty shock idea of Bloom (2009) with a model of international trade, extending the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic uncertainty, parental selection, and the criminal activity of the 'Children of the Wall'

We study the link between parental selection and children criminality in a new context. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany experienced an unprecedented temporary drop in fertility driven by economic uncertai...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Fluctuations in uncertainty

This review article tries to answer four questions: (i) what are the stylized facts about uncertainty over time; (ii) why does uncertainty vary; (iii) do fluctuations in uncertainty matter; and (iv) did higher uncertaint...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does uncertainty reduce growth? Using disasters as natural experiments

A growing body of evidence suggests that uncertainty is counter cyclical, rising sharply in recessions and falling in booms. But what is the causal relationship between uncertainty and growth? To identify this we constru...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Incomplete contracts and the internal organisation of firms

We survey the theoretical and empirical literature on decentralization within firms. We first discuss how the concept of incomplete contracts shapes our views about the organization of decision-making within firms. We th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Really Uncertain Business Cycles

We propose uncertainty shocks as a new shock that drives business cycles. First, we demonstrate that microeconomic uncertainty is robustly countercyclical, rising sharply during recessions, particularly during the Great ...Read more...

CEP US election analysis

Economic Recovery and Policy Uncertainty

Until some political mechanism creates incentives to elect moderate representatives who can reach across the ideological divide, the US seems destined to heightened levels of policy uncertainty for many years to come. So...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Sequential Exporting

Firms need to incur substantial sunk costs to break in foreign markets, yet many give up exporting shortly after their first experience, which typically involves very small sales. Conversely, other new exporters shoot up...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multinational Firms, Monopolistic Competition and Foreign Investment Uncertainty

This is a model of multinational firms, which introduces option value of foreign direct investment, into a framework of Dixit-Stiglitz type monopolistic competition. Starting from a pure trading equilibrium and solving f...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Policy Uncertainty and Precautionary Savings

In 1997 Chancellor Kohl proposed a major pension reform: he pushed the law through Parliament explaining that the German PAYG system had become unsustainable. One limitation of the new law - one that is crucial for our i...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Uncertainty and the Dynamics of R&D

Uncertainty varies strongly over time, rising by 50% to 100% in recessions and by up to 200% after major economic and political shocks. This paper shows that higher uncertainty reduces the responsiveness of R&D to change...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Uncertainty and Investment Dynamics

This paper shows that, with (partial) irreversibility, higher uncertainty reduces the impact effect of demand shocks on investment. Uncertainty increases real option values making firms more cautious when investing or di...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Uncertainty Shocks: Firm Level Estimation and a 9/11 Simulation

Uncertainty appears to vary strongly over time, temporarily rising by up to 200% around major shocks like the Cuban Missile crisis, the assassination of JFK and 9/11. This paper offers the first structural framework to a...Read more...