IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fedbpb/00001.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The impact of policy uncertainty on U. S. employment: industry evidence

Author

Listed:
  • J. Christina Wang

Abstract

The anemic pace of the recovery of the U. S. economy from the Great Recession has frequently been blamed on heightened uncertainty, much of which concerns the nation?s fiscal policy. Intuition suggests that increased policy uncertainty likely has different impacts on different industries, to the extent that industries differ in their exposure to government policies. This study utilizes industry data to explore whether policy uncertainty indeed affects the dynamics of employment, and particularly its impact on industry employment, during this recovery. This analysis focuses on heterogeneity across industries in terms of the fraction of their product demand that can ultimately be attributed to federal government expenditures. The estimation results reveal that policy uncertainty indeed retards employment growth more in industries that rely more heavily on federal government demand: the growth rate of employment in these industries appears to have been four-tenths of a percentage point lower during the quarters in recent years when policy uncertainty spiked.

Suggested Citation

  • J. Christina Wang, 2013. "The impact of policy uncertainty on U. S. employment: industry evidence," Public Policy Brief, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedbpb:00001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/ppb/2013/ppb133.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Susanto Basu & Brent Bundick, 2017. "Uncertainty Shocks in a Model of Effective Demand," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 85, pages 937-958, May.
    2. Leduc, Sylvain & Liu, Zheng, 2016. "Uncertainty shocks are aggregate demand shocks," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 20-35.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. J. Christina Wang, 2013. "The cost of fiscal policy uncertainty: industry evidence of its impact on the labor market," Working Papers 13-22, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Idriss Fontaine, 2021. "Uncertainty and Labour Force Participation," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 83(2), pages 437-471, April.
    2. Miescu, Mirela & Rossi, Raffaele, 2021. "COVID-19-induced shocks and uncertainty," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 139(C).
    3. Alessandri, Piergiorgio & Mumtaz, Haroon, 2019. "Financial regimes and uncertainty shocks," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 31-46.
    4. N. Bloom, 2016. "Fluctuations in uncertainty," Voprosy Ekonomiki, NP Voprosy Ekonomiki, issue 4.
    5. Bandi, Federico M. & Bretscher, Lorenzo & Tamoni, Andrea, 2023. "Return predictability with endogenous growth," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 150(3).
    6. Joëts, Marc & Mignon, Valérie & Razafindrabe, Tovonony, 2017. "Does the volatility of commodity prices reflect macroeconomic uncertainty?," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 313-326.
    7. Arigoni, Filippo & Lenarčič, Črt, 2020. "The impact of trade policy uncertainty shocks on the Euro Area," MPRA Paper 100832, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Magnus Reif, 2020. "Macroeconomics, Nonlinearities, and the Business Cycle," ifo Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsforschung, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, number 87.
    9. Troy Davig & Andrew Foerster, 2019. "Uncertainty and Fiscal Cliffs," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 51(7), pages 1857-1887, October.
    10. B M, Lithin & chakraborty, Suman & iyer, Vishwanathan & M N, Nikhil & ledwani, Sanket, 2022. "Modeling asymmetric sovereign bond yield volatility with univariate GARCH models: Evidence from India," MPRA Paper 117067, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 05 Jan 2023.
    11. Josué Diwambuena & Jean-Paul K. Tsasa, 2021. "The Real Effects of Uncertainty Shocks: New Evidence from Linear and Nonlinear SVAR Models," BEMPS - Bozen Economics & Management Paper Series BEMPS87, Faculty of Economics and Management at the Free University of Bozen.
    12. Isoré, Marlène & Szczerbowicz, Urszula, 2017. "Disaster risk and preference shifts in a New Keynesian model," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 97-125.
    13. Giovanni Caggiano & Efrem Castelnuovo & Gabriela Nodari, 2014. "Uncertainty and Monetary Policy in Good and Bad Times," "Marco Fanno" Working Papers 0188, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Marco Fanno".
    14. Niko Hauzenberger & Maximilian Bock & Michael Pfarrhofer & Anna Stelzer & Gregor Zens, 2018. "Implications of macroeconomic volatility in the Euro area," Papers 1801.02925, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2018.
    15. Forni, Mario & Gambetti, Luca & Maffei-Faccioli, Nicolo & Sala, Luca, 2023. "The Impact of Financial Shocks on the Forecast Distribution of Output and Inflation," CEPR Discussion Papers 18076, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    16. Caggiano, Giovanni & Castelnuovo, Efrem & Kima, Richard, 2020. "The global effects of Covid-19-induced uncertainty," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 194(C).
    17. Brandyn Bok & Thomas M. Mertens & John C. Williams, 2022. "Macroeconomic Drivers and the Pricing of Uncertainty, Inflation, and Bonds," Working Paper Series 2022-06, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
    18. Rivolta, Giulia & Trecroci, Carmine, 2020. "Measuring the effects of U.S. uncertainty and monetary conditions on EMEs' macroeconomic dynamics," MPRA Paper 99403, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Caggiano, Giovanni & Castelnuovo, Efrem & Delrio, Silvia & Kima, Richard, 2021. "Financial uncertainty and real activity: The good, the bad, and the ugly," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 136(C).
    20. Athanasios Triantafyllou & Dimitrios Bakas & Marilou Ioakimidis, 2023. "Commodity price uncertainty as a leading indicator of economic activity," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(4), pages 4194-4219, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    hours; industry accounts; fiscal policy; employment; input-output tables; uncertainty;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D80 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - General
    • E66 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - General Outlook and Conditions
    • D57 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Input-Output Tables and Analysis
    • L50 - Industrial Organization - - Regulation and Industrial Policy - - - General
    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • G18 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Government Policy and Regulation

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedbpb:00001. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Spozio (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbbous.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.