THE IMPACT OF ECONOMIC POLICY UNCERTAINTY ON INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES: PRE-PANDEMIC EVIDENCE

Abstract

Although the Covid-19 pandemic (the Great Lockdown), which began in March 2020, is not over yet (mainly due to new SARS-CoV-2 variants, such as Delta), there is already a growing body of evidence that suggests that the Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to an increase in economic policy uncertainty in the United States and the rest of the world. In this paper, I examine the impact of economic policy uncertainty on industrial production in the United States before the Covid-19 pandemic. Using vector autoregression, I found that industrial production in the United States responds negatively to a positive economic policy uncertainty shock in the United States. This suggests that US economic policymakers need to prevent economic policy uncertainty in the United States