Investment and Subjective Uncertainty

Nicholas Bloom, Steven J Davis, Lucia S Foster, Scott W Ohlmacher, Itay Saporta-Eksten

Research output: Working paper / PreprintWorking paper

Abstract

A longstanding challenge in evaluating the impact of uncertainty on investment is obtaining measures of managers' subjective uncertainty. We address this challenge by using a detailed new survey measure of subjective uncertainty collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for approximately 25,000 manufacturing plants. We find three key results. First, investment is strongly and robustly negatively associated with higher uncertainty, with a two standard deviation increase in uncertainty associated with about a 6% reduction in investment. Second, uncertainty is also negatively related to employment growth and overall shipments (sales) growth, which highlights the damaging impact of uncertainty on firm growth. Third, flexible inputs like rental capital and temporary workers show a positive relationship to uncertainty, demonstrating that businesses switch from less flexible to more flexible factor inputs at higher levels of uncertainty.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationCambridge, Mass
PublisherNational Bureau of Economic Research
Number of pages28
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2022

Publication series

NameNBER working paper series
PublisherNational Bureau of Economic Research
No.30654

ULI Keywords

  • uli

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