Macroeconomic uncertainty shocks and households’ consumption choice

Exploiting U.S. households’ consumption survey data, we study whether recently developed indices of macroeconomic uncertainty (e.g., Jurado et al., 2015; Baker et al., 2016; Bekaert et al., 2019) affect household consumption choices. We find that positive shocks to financial, real, and macroeconomic uncertainty indices by Jurado et al. (2015), as well as S&P 500 implied volatility (VIX) significantly depress U.S. households’ consumption. We …