Anna-Leigh Stone, associate professor of finance and Hackney Family Research Fellow, has had new research accepted for publication by the Journal of Macroeconomics. The article titled “The impact of uncertainty shocks on state-level employment” differs slightly from Stone’s more frequent writings in the banking and finance sectors and continues some of her early work in uncertainties.

 

In summary, the research uses U.S. data from the third quarter of 1960 through the fourth quarter of 2019 to estimate a structural factor-augmented vector autoregressive model and find that a one standard deviation shock to macroeconomic uncertainty generates declines in state-level employment growth. Cross-sectional regressions show that industry mix is an important channel through which uncertainty shocks affect employment growth. In particular, a state with a larger manufacturing sector experiences a larger decline in employment growth. 

 

Stone coauthored the article with her husband, William B. Hankins, an associate professor of economics at Jacksonville State University, and Chak Hung Jack Chang, an associate professor of economics at the University South Carolina Upstate.