Macroeconomic Uncertainty

A much needed bridge between financial and commercial decision making is provided by this comprehensive coverage of macroeconomic uncertainty.

This book offers the essential elements of a corporate strategy for managing uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment. This strategy enhances firm value by allowing management and external stakeholders to distinguish between changes in the intrinsic competitiveness of the firm and changes in performance caused by macroeconomic fluctuations.--Résumé de l'éditeur.

This title was first published in 2002: This monograph sets out to model a macroeconomy that is inherently unstable because of qualitative - or Keynesian - uncertainty. By modelling a macroeconomic theory, this approach to fixed or sticky prices also investigates the link between uncertainty, sticky prices, and macro-stability - by suggesting that such prices improve economic activity rather than impeding it.

Macroeconomic turbulence and volatility in financial markets can fatally affect firm's performance. Very few firms make serious attempts to inform market participants and other outsider stakeholders about the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations--manifested as changes in exchange rates, interest rates, inflation rates and stock market returns-- on performance. These stakeholders, as well as financial analysts, must make their own assessments but they generally lack both the required tools and the information to do so. Worse, top management in most firms do not themselves possess the tools to identify whether a change in performance represents a change in the firm's intrinsic competitiveness or a reflection of macroeconomic conditions outside their influence. Corporate Decision-Making with Macroeconomic Uncertainty: Performance and Risk Management develops and presents in an easily comprehensible way the essential elements of a corporate strategy for managing uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment. This Macroeconomic Uncertainty Strategy, or MUST, enhances firm value by allowing management and external stakeholders to become better informed about the development of corporate competitiveness in a turbulent macroeconomic environment. The MUST also provides guidelines for how to develop a successful risk management program. This research based book includes methods to identify the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on cash flows and value, to develop strategies for macroeconomic risk management, to provide informative reports to external stakeholders, to evaluate the relative performance of subsidiaries and business units in multinational companies, and to evaluate performance for purposes of setting executive compensation and of fulfilling the due diligence requirements in an M & A context. The authors' use of value-based management, various performance measurements, the concept of real options, and risk management from the perspective of shareholder wealth maximization, makes the book rich and compelling. They address researchers and students in the field of international business, finance and corporate governance. On the business side, executives with strategic responsibilities, chief financial officers, and bankers who analyze corporate performance and give advice on risk management will benefit from reading this book.

The relationship between current account developments and changes in the macroeconomic environment remains a key issue in open economy macroeconomics. This paper extends the standard intertemporal optimizing model of the current account to incorporate the effects of macroeconomic uncertainty on private savings behavior. It is shown that the greater the uncertainty in national cash flow, defined as output less investment less government expenditure, the greater is the precautionary demand for savings and, other things equal, the larger is the current account surplus. Empirical support for the model is found using quarterly data from four large industrial countries.

This book addresses one of the most important research activities in empirical macroeconomics. It provides a course of advanced but intuitive methods and tools enabling the spatial and temporal disaggregation of basic macroeconomic variables and the assessment of the statistical uncertainty of the outcomes of disaggregation. The empirical analysis focuses mainly on GDP and its growth in the context of Poland. However, all of the methods discussed can be easily applied to other countries. The approach used in the book views spatial and temporal disaggregation as a special case of the estimation of missing observations (a topic on missing data analysis). The book presents an econometric course of models of Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equations (SURE). The main advantage of using the SURE specification is to tackle the presented research problem so that it allows for the heterogeneity of the parameters describing relations between macroeconomic indicators. The book contains model specification, as well as descriptions of stochastic assumptions and resulting procedures of estimation and testing. The method also addresses uncertainty in the estimates produced. All of the necessary tests and assumptions are presented in detail. The results are designed to serve as a source of invaluable information making regional analyses more convenient and - more importantly - comparable. It will create a solid basis for making conclusions and recommendations concerning regional economic policy in Poland, particularly regarding the assessment of the economic situation. This is essential reading for academics, researchers, and economists with regional analysis as their field of expertise, as well as central bankers and policymakers.