Endogenous Growth Cycles in Continuous Time

The endogenous dynamics of a closed constant returns multi-market economy are examined in which agents face downward sloping demand. The trigger for growth in this model is a technological change that warrants costly adjustment in input quantities by agents. In the resulting dynamic game, relative prices within markets remain constant. Consequently, all own price elasticities are constant. In markets characterized by lower cost of capital the unique outcome is collusion in which agents do not incur adjustment cost and there is no adoption of new technology. But in other markets a unique non-cooperative equilibrium exists in which agents do incur the cost of adopting the new technology. Only three specifications of adjustment costs are feasible. Output increases along an S-shaped time path with or without a non-explosive cyclical component.     

我国汽车业技术进步率及技术贡献率的实证研究

基于C-D生产函数,对我国汽车业的技术进步率及技术贡献率进行了实证研究。研究发现:1991—2008年期间我国汽车业的技术进步率较低,且波动性很大;我国汽车业技术要素对产业发展的贡献率低,也呈现不稳定性。技术进步率和技术贡献率的这种特征可以解释我国汽车产业运行不稳定和效率低下的现状。     

Service Production Functions

The paper derives production functions designed to model the evolution of service industries. The derivation is based on specifying the output elasticities of the factors according to differential equations and asymptotic technological boundary conditions in factor space. The derived functional forms incorporate labor, capital, energy, and technology parameters, whose time changes model innovation and structural change. The model is applied to the evolution of the German market-determined services 1960–1989.     

Capacity constraints, asymmetries, and the business cycle

We study how an occasionally binding capacity constraint affects the properties of business cycles. A real business cycle model is constructed where production takes place at individual plants and the number of plants operated varies over the cycle. The capacity constraint binds in states where all plants are operated. We derive the aggregate production function for this economy, which turns out to differ from the standard Cobb–Douglas function while retaining its desirable properties. The business cycle features of this one-sector growth model are similar to those of a standard real business cycle model in most respects. Our model does, however, display some properties of actual economies that standard models do not. In particular, business cycles in our model are asymmetric—troughs are deeper on average than peaks are tall. Also, labor's share of income is counter-cyclical, as it is in US data.     

The Hicks‐Malinvaud average period of production and ‘marginal productivity’: A critical assessment

Abstract

Malinvaud took up the concept of the average period of production introduced by Hicks in Value and Capital and then Capital and Time, in an article of 2003 celebrating Wicksell's contribution to the theory of capital, where he observed that once techniques are ranked according to the average period for a given initial rate of interest, a rise in the rate of interest entails the use of a technique with a shorter average period. After a brief reconstruction of Malinvaud's argument, it is shown that the result is far less encouraging for neoclassical theory than it might seem. The most important problem is not the fact that change in the interest rate affects the average period of production associated with a technique, despite the concern this aroused in Hicks and Malinvaud, but rather that it affects the ranking of techniques. An example with two techniques is used to show that a rise in the rate of interest entails the use of a technique with a shorter average period even in the case of reswitching simply because the ranking of techniques is inverted at the two switch points.     

Capacity utilization and technology shocks in the US manufacturing sector

The ability of real business cycle models to generate reasonable aggregate fluctuations depends on the time series properties of technology shocks measured by the change of total factor productivity. Three specifications of a non‐parametric productivity analysis which correct to different degrees for variations of capacity utilization are compared in this article using data for three‐ and four‐digit US manufacturing industries during the years 1958–1996. The results show that correcting for utilization generally leads to substantially smaller technology shocks that are less strongly correlated with growth of output and hours. Moreover, the probability of technological regress is considerably lower after the correction.     

The effect of remittances prior to an election

The objective of the article is to assess whether remittances have an influence on political manipulation, which may occur prior to an election, through an increase in the government consumption-to-GDP ratio. We combine data from the National Elections across Democracy and Autocracy data set compiled and discussed in Hyde and Marinov (2012) and the World Development Indicators data set. We focus on 70 developing countries over the period 1990–2010. It appears that the political budget cycle is reduced up to the point where it is fully cancelled out at a remittance threshold of 10.7% of GDP. Those findings are robust to different robustness checks.     

Singapore's Manufacturing Sector's TFP Growth: A Decomposition Analysis

Singapore has been criticized recently for experiencing insignificant total factor productivity (TFP) growth. This paper examines whether this criticism is valid in the context of the manufacturing sector of Singapore. Using new data and the stochastic production frontier approach, TFP growth is decomposed into technological progress and changes in technical efficiency. While the results could not reject the hypothesis that Singapore's output growth is mostly input-driven, they show that, despite technological progress, technical inefficiency is the cause for the low and declining TFP growth in the manufacturing sector.J. Comp. Econom., December 2000, 28(4), pp. 828–839. The University of Queensland; Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University.     

投资、技术进步与中国经济增长

中国宏观经济运行暗含着不同于发达国家的基本前提假设,这决定了我国经济增长的基本特征。在我国引进式技术进步方式下,存在投资的潮涌现象和经济的结构性高速增长。     

我国加工贸易的技术进步效应研究

我国的加工贸易将国际贸易和外商直接投资紧密地联系在一起。加工贸易具有显著的技术进步效应。加工贸易带动了机械设备等资本品和中间产品的进口,直接带来了新产品、新技术并建立起新的产业。加工贸易从国内和国际两个市场强化了企业之间的竞争,增强了企业的模仿能力,加深了企业之间的联系,增加了人力资本的流动。     

New directions in business cycle research and financial analysis

This paper serves as a partial introduction to and survey of the literature on Markov-switching models. We review the history of this class of models, describe their mathematical structure, and exposit the basic ideas behind estimation and inference. The paper also describes how the approach can be extended in a variety of directions, such as non-Gaussian distributions, time-varying transition probabilities, vector processes, state-space and GARCH models, and surveys recent methodological advances. The contributions of the other papers in this volume are reviewed. A final section offers conclusions and implications for policy. First Version Received: August 2001/Final Version Received: October 2001     

On the measurement and analysis of aggregate economic activity for China: the coincident economic indicators approach

This paper reviews some of China's high-frequency economic indicators and our principal findings on their selection and use. Our aim is to develop a composite index of coincident economic indicators (coincident economic index, CEI) which can be used to obtain timely information on the present state of the China's economy and provide an appropriate measure to analyze China's short-term macroeconomic dynamics. Notably, combining industrial production, retail sales, manufacturing employment, income of financial institutions and passenger traffic volume, they work well as the method for dating business cycles for China. It shows that, over the past two decades, there was one marked recession which occurred in 1988:8 to 1989:12. In addition to this business cycle chronology we also develop a growth cycle chronology based on the deviations from trend of the CE which shows that there have been four cyclical slowdowns since 1986. Whereas GDP growth lacks cyclical movements and appears to be dominated by trend and irregular movements, in contrast to GDP, the CEI works well as a measure of cyclical dynamics and can contribute to the analysis of short-term fluctuations of Chinese economic activity relative to its long-term growth.     

Determinants of co-movement and of lead and lag behavior of business cycles in the Eurozone

In this paper we study business cycle correlations in the Eurozone and its determinants. Additionally, we also analyze the determinants of the lead and lag behavior of business cycles in the Eurozone. We explore the relevance, in the Eurozone context, using GDP and employment as the business cycle measures, of the determinants of business cycle synchronization identified in the literature, namely bilateral trade intensity, dissimilarity of labor market rigidity, dissimilarity in industrial structures, financial openness, and foreign direct investment relations. We estimate a simultaneous 4-equations model by Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and three-stage least square to investigate empirically the above-mentioned determinants of business cycle correlation. Bilateral trade relations present a positive influence on business cycle correlations, while the dissimilarity of labor market rigidity presents a negative influence. The rest of the above-mentioned variables are non-significant. These results are robust to the use of the Hodrick–Prescott-filter and first differences as the de-trending methods, as well as the use of GDP as the business cycle measure, excluding the financial crisis years (2008 and 2009). Results for employment as the business cycle measure are in contrast with the previous ones, and found industrial dissimilarity to be the relevant variable to determine business cycles synchronization. In what concerns the determinants of the lead and lag behavior, results show that the member states of the Eurozone that usually lead the cycle are the ones that are wealthier, with strict employment legislation, more specialized in construction and finance sectors, and more prone to international capital movements. Differences in the determinants between contemporaneous business cycles and lead and lag behavior of business cycles are especially important for policy-makers in the Eurozone to know about, in particular if asymmetric shocks between countries are set in place.