Firm-level business uncertainty and the predictability of the aggregate U.S. stock market volatility during the COVID-19 pandemic
Riza Demirer,
Rangan Gupta,
Afees Salisu and
Reneé van Eyden
The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 2023, vol. 88, issue C, 295-302
Abstract:
In this paper, we analyze the predictive role of firm-level business expectations and uncertainties derived from a panel survey of U.S. 1750 business executives from 50 states for the realized variance (sum of daily squared log-returns over a month) of the S&P500 index over the monthly period of September 2016 to July 2021. Unlike standard models, our predictive framework adopts a time-varying approach due to the existence of multiple structural breaks in the relationship between volatility and the predictors in the model, which in turn leads to statistically insignificant causal effects in a constant parameter set-up. Our time-varying results suggest that the predictive power of firm-level business uncertainty is concentrated during the early part of the sample associated with the U.S.-China trade war and towards the end of our data coverage in the wake of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since in-sample predictability does not guarantee the same over an out-sample, we also conducted a full-fledged forecasting exercise to show that subjective expectations and uncertainties associated with sales growth rates and employment produce statistically significant predictability gains over January 2020 to July 2021, given an in-sample of September 2016 to December 2019. Our results suggest that subjective measures of business uncertainty at the firm level indeed capture predictive information regarding aggregate stock market uncertainty, which has important implications for investors and economic projections at the policy level.
Keywords: S&P500 realized variance; Firm-level expectations and uncertainties; Time-varying predictability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 C53 D80 G10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1062976923000194
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Working Paper: Firm-level Business Uncertainty and the Predictability of the Aggregate U.S. Stock Market Volatility during the COVID-19 Pandemic (2021)
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:eee:quaeco:v:88:y:2023:i:c:p:295-302
DOI: 10.1016/j.qref.2023.02.002
Access Statistics for this article
The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance is currently edited by R. J. Arnould and J. E. Finnerty
More articles in The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().