Macroeconomic Uncertainty and Investment – Empirical Analysis for Romania

From a theoretical point of view, uncertainty may have an impact on investment by different channels and in different directions. Thus, the sign of its overall effect is unknown and could be found only empirically from the historical data. This paper analyzes the relation between macroeconomic uncertainty and total investment in Romania over the period 2000-2008. As a source of uncertainty, it considers different measures of volatility in prices and exchange rate from autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) models. These measures are introduced as a linear and a quadratic term in the investment equation. The results prove a nonlinear effect of uncertainty on investment.