Measuring uncertainty for New Zealand using data‐rich approach

This paper develops two state‐of‐the‐art uncertainty indices for New Zealand by exploiting two separate data‐rich environments. The first index follows the methodology outlined in Jurado, Ludvigson and Ng (2015) to construct an estimate of uncertainty based on a large New Zealand macro dataset. The second index is constructed based on freely accessible and real time Google Trends data to provide a real‐time and freely‐accessible measure of uncertainty as in Castelnuovo and Tran (2017) and Shields and Tran (2018). Both indices do a reasonable job measuring uncertainty in New Zealand. VAR evidence documents significant impacts of uncertainty shocks on GDP in New Zealand.