Equity Market Volatility: Infectious Disease Tracker

Assessing the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is essential for policymakers, but challenging because the crisis has unfolded with extreme speed. We identify three indicators: stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic uncertainty, and subjective uncertainty in business expectation surveys that provide real-time forward-looking uncertainty measures. We use these indicators to document and quantify the enormous increase in economic uncertainty in the past several weeks. For more information, see Baker, Scott, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis (2020), 'COVID-INDUCED ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY' (http://www.policyuncertainty.com/media/COVID-Induced%20Economic%20Uncertainty.pdf)