While organizational-level IS research on IT investment has primarily focused on internal factors driving investment decisions, as we have become increasingly aware of the susceptibility of those decisions to external forces, it is merited to focus our attention on understanding external shocks to the organization and how these drive IT investment decisions. In this paper, we conceptualize macroeconomic shocks to IT investment and propose a framework to classify and analyze macroeconomic events for IT investment research as part of a broader effort to explore the impact of exogenous forces on IT investment decisions.