Real business cycles: is neglecting demand shocks justified?

Real business cycle models generally neglect demand shocks. Technological productivity shocks are the primary source of economic fluctuations. The multisectoral consequences of this assumption are described in the well-known model of Long and Plosser (1983). The presented paper shows that according to their view consumer goods sectors must be found in lagging positions. However, generalizing the strong assumption of pure supply driven dynamics by some demand-determined influences leads to ambiguous theoretical results such that only empirical evidence can answer the question whether sectoral lead-lag relationships are in accordance with real business cycle theory. Using cross spectral analysis and causality tests leads to a rejection of the Long and Plosser view of intersectoral comovements. On the contrary, the empirical results suggest that the backward propagation mechanism of demand shocks dominates the forward propagation of supply disturbances.     

On the integration of growth and business cycles

This paper discusses several approaches to generating the observed persistence in macro models and presents evidence in favor of models where endogenous technology adoption propagates transitory shocks into the medium term. Prepared for the Conference on “The Interrelation of Cycles and Growth” in honor of Gunther Tichy.

---

Differentiating between business cycles and growth cycles: evidence from 15 developed countries

Growth cycles are often mistaken for business cycles, although these two have different statistical properties. In order to differentiate between them in a statistically satisfactory manner, the Bayesian information criterion-(BIC) based model-selection approach is presented. Business cycles are described by the cyclical trend model, and growth cycles are described by the trend-plus-cycle model. Whether the observed time series is derived from business cycles or from growth cycles is determined as a result of model selection. It is shown via data-based simulations that the proposed method works well in most situations. Empirical results obtained for 15 countries suggest that the business cycle model is selected for five countries, the growth cycle model is selected for two countries and the trend-plus-noise model is selected for eight countries.     

Economic growth,Koestler cycles and the lock chamber effect

This paper develops a suggestion contained in a 1940 novel by A. Koestler. A dynamic model is built to analyze the relationship among economic growth, complexity, “maturity” of the population, and propensity to contribute to the stock of a public good. Economic growth is represented as a process that exogenously generates technical innovations: these increase the division of labor and make the social structure increasingly complex. Information about the new structure can only be gathered at a cost, so that in general, knowledge of the “true” structure lags behind the changes of the structure itself. Economic growth then causes cycles in the individuals’ perception of their best interests. Accessibility to information influences the length and the amplitude of such cycles.     

The role of agriculture in aggregate business cycles

There are substantial differences in business cycle fluctuations across countries. These differences are systematically related to the share of agriculture in the economy: Countries with a high share of employment in agriculture feature high fluctuations in aggregate output, low relative volatility of aggregate employment, and low correlation of aggregate output and employment. In addition, agriculture has certain distinctive features over the business cycle: Output and employment in agriculture are more volatile than and not positively correlated with output and employment in the rest of the economy and output and employment are less correlated in agriculture than in non-agriculture. Because of these features, agriculture may play a role in accounting for aggregate business cycles across countries. We calibrate an otherwise standard two-sector indivisible-labor business cycle model with agriculture and non-agriculture to aggregate and sectoral data for the United States. We find that an increase in the employment to population ratio in agriculture from 2 to 30 percent in our model increases fluctuations in aggregate output by almost 40 percent. This is about 2/3 of the difference in aggregate fluctuations between countries such as Turkey and the United States.     

Discoveries, innovations, and business cycles

There is considerable evidence that the density of basic innovations is peaked at definite periods with intervals of about 40–60 years. This has been used as support for the behavior of economic cycles as postulated by Kontradieff and amplified by Schumpeter. Recently some economists have used this model to forecast economic recovery in the middle or late 1980s.This paper points out that the shape of the clusters of innovation or inventions are different and sharper than those of economic depression or economic recovery. The transfer of knowledge from basic inventions to industrial innovations shortens as one moves from the 18th to the 20th century, and some probable explanations for this are offered. The importance of discoveries and limited discoveries to the process of invention and innovation is discussed. Also shown is that discoveries reveal cluster phenomena which are functionally related to the clusters of invention and innovation.     

Firm dynamics in news-driven business cycles: the role of endogenous survival rate

Evidences from the structural vector-error correction model shows that the new business formation and stock prices co-moves with output under news shocks. However, simply incorporating firm dynamics into Jaimovich and Rebelo’s (Jaimovich and Rebelo, 2009) model cannot explain these empirical findings. We show that this problem can be resolved by introducing endogenous survival rates for the new entrants.     

Subprime borrowers,securitization and the transmission of business cycles

A growing literature (e.g., Jaffee et al. 2009, Acharya and Schnabl 2009) argues that securitization improves financial stability if the securitized assets are held by capital market participants, rather than financial intermediaries. I construct a quantitative macroeconomic model with a novel specification for mortgage‐backed securities (MBS) to evaluate this claim. My findings suggest that the existence of the securitization market stabilizes the economy under the condition that financial intermediaries do not engage in the acquisition of securitized assets. In the presence of large negative housing preference shocks, the drop in output in the first year after the shock is halved if subprime MBS are purchased by non‐financial agents rather than held by banks.     

Financial intermediation,consumption dynamics,and business cycles

The recent financial crisis highlighted the need to deepen our understanding of the impact of the financial intermediation sector on the real economy. We examine the quantitative implications of financial intermediation and firm's financing frictions in explaining the observed cyclical properties of both real and financial variables. We find that a modified version of the financial intermediation framework of Gertler and Karadi (2011) augmented with financing frictions in production does a good job in matching the unconditional moments of financial fluctuations without compromising key real co-movements. Our results are relevant for macro-prudential policy analysis as they underscore the importance of carefully identifying the sources of aggregate fluctuations in models in which financial intermediaries and financial frictions play a non-trivial role.     

Asymmetric information, financial intermediation, and business cycles

Summary. This incorporates a debt contracting problem with asymmetric information into a standard monetary business cycle model. The model incorporates a limited participation assumption in order to induce a liquidity effect of monetary shocks and propagate monetary disturbances. The model economy shows that a positive money supply shock generates a decrease in nominal interest rates and an increase in output level. Asymmetric information amplifies the response of capital to the money supply shock, but does not propagate them in other ways. When the monetary shock is an innovation in reserve requirements, it induces a persistent response of the economy. Received: March 20, 1998; revised version: 1 April 1998     

Consumption,wealth and business cycles in Germany

This paper studies the long-run relationship between consumption, asset wealth and income—the consumption–wealth ratio—based on German data from 1980 to 2003. We find that departures from this long-run relationship mainly predict adjustments in income. The German consumption–wealth ratio also contains considerable forecasting power for a range of business cycle indicators, including the unemployment rate. This finding is in contrast to earlier studies for some of the Anglo-Saxon economies that have shown that the consumption–wealth ratio reverts to its long-run mean mainly through subsequent adjustments in asset prices. While the German consumption wealth ratio contains little information about future changes in German asset prices, we report that the U.S. consumption–wealth ratio has considerable forecasting power for the German stock market. One explanation of these findings is that in Germany—due to structural differences in the financial and pension systems—the share of publicly traded equity in aggregate household wealth is much smaller than in the Anglo-Saxon countries. We discuss the implications of our results for the measurement of a potential wealth effect on consumption. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not reflect the position of the Deutsche Bundesbank. We gratefully acknowledge comments and suggestions from an anonymous referee as well as from Heinz Herrmann, Helmut Lütkepohl, the editor, Baldev Raj, Burkhard Raunig, Monika Schnitzer, Harald Uhlig and Christian Upper. We also benefitted from comments by seminar participants at the ECB, the Deutsche Bundesbank, the CESifo Macro, Money and International Finance Area Conference 2005, the EEA 2005 annual congress and at the 2005 IAEA Meetings. Last but not least, we would like to thank Mark Weth for very useful information concerning the construction of the financial wealth data. Hoffmann’s work on this paper is also part of the project The International Allocation of Risk funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in the framework of SFB 475. Responsibility for any remaining errors and shortcomings is entirely our own.     

Inward FDI spillovers and innovation capabilities in Chinese business: exploring the moderating role of local industrial externalities

It is generally believed foreign direct investment (FDI) has spillover effects which can affect the innovation capabilities of local firms in host countries. Comparatively little, however, is known about the contingent local contextual factors that influence how these FDI spillovers can be captured. Integrating the literature on FDI knowledge spillovers with that on inter- and intra-industrial externalities, we explore how local industrial agglomeration moderates the effect of FDI knowledge spillovers on innovation in the emerging market context of China. Empirical estimates, based on panel data of 1610 listed indigenous Chinese firms recorded between 2000 and 2010, indicate that such spillovers are more easily captured in industrially diverse settings. By contrast, industrial specialisation negatively moderates this relationship. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Fiscal policy,business cycles and discretion: evidence from the Western Balkans

While previous research has examined the macroeconomic performance of the New Member States during the boom–bust cycle of the 2000s, very little has been written on the experience of the Western Balkans. In this article we investigate the responsiveness of fiscal policy to business cycles in the Western Balkans, examining whether expenditure moved counter-cyclically and whether a larger proportion of expenditure was ‘discretionary’; that is, related to the political cycle rather than economic conditions. Our results suggest that fiscal policy did not move counter-cyclically in the Western Balkans. Instead, countries overspent in the boom years and then reduced spending as a result of financing constraints during the crisis. Furthermore, the discretionary component of fiscal policy, defined here as spending unexplained by inertia and economic conditions, appears to be somewhat larger in the Western Balkans than in the European Union. This has important policy implications that affect the effectiveness of fiscal policy in dampening economic fluctuations.     

Economic migration and business cycles in a small open economy with matching frictions

With the free movement of labour in Europe, economic migration has become an important determinant of labour supply. Cyclical migration exceeds one percent of the population in many countries and affects (un)employment and wage setting. The main contribution of this paper is that it models migration as an endogenous decision in a search-and-matching framework, where labour market institutions play an important role. It shows that, contrary to typical beliefs, migration can amplify business cycles. After a positive shock to the economy, immigration increases the labour force and initially unemployment. The latter reduces a worker's outside option in wage negotiations, resulting in a lower wage increase than when there is no migration. With cheaper labour firms post more job vacancies, which increases the probability that unemployed workers find jobs and attracts new workers to immigrate. Attenuated response of wages and the stronger response of employment to shocks result in a flatter Phillips curve.     

The dynamics of entrepreneurship: hysteresis, business cycles and government policy

This article estimates two unobserved components models to explore the macrodynamics of entrepreneurship in Spain and the USA. We ask whether entrepreneurship exhibits hysteresis, defined as a macrodynamic structure in which the cyclical component of entrepreneurship has persistent effects on the natural rate of entrepreneurship. We find evidence of hysteresis in Spain, but not the USA, while in Spain business cycle output variations significantly affect future rates of entrepreneurship. The article discusses implications of the findings for the design of entrepreneurship policies.     

Matching frictions,unemployment dynamics and the cost of business cycles

We investigate the welfare cost of business cycles implied by matching frictions. First, using the reduced form of the matching model, we show that job finding rate fluctuations generate intrinsically a non-linear effect on unemployment: positive shocks reduce unemployment less than negative shocks increase it. For the observed process of the job finding rate in the US economy, this intrinsic asymmetry increases average unemployment, which leads to substantial business cycles costs. Moreover, the structural matching model embeds other non-linearities, which alter the average job finding rate and consequently the welfare cost of business cycles. Our theory suggests to subsidizing employment in order to dampen the impact of the job finding rate fluctuations on welfare.     

Firm-specific capital,inflation persistence and the sources of business cycles

This paper estimates a firm-specific capital DSGE model. Firm-specific capital improves the fit of DSGE models to the data (as shown by a large increase in the value of the log marginal likelihood). This results from a lower implied estimate of the NKPC slope for a given degree of price stickiness. Firm-specific capital leads to a better fit to the volatilities of macro variables and a greater persistence of inflation. It is also shown that firm-specific capital reduces the dependence of New Keynesian models on price markup shocks and that it increases the persistence of output to monetary shocks.     

Real earnings and business cycles: new evidence

In the time domain, the observed cyclical behavior of the real wage hides a range of economic influences that give rise to cycles of differing lengths and strengths. This may serve to produce a distorted picture of wage cyclicality. Here, we employ frequency domain methods that allow us to assess the relative contribution of cyclical frequency bands on real wage earnings. Earnings are decomposed into standard and overtime components. We also distinguish between consumption and production wages. Frequency domain analysis is carried out in relation to wages alone and to wages in relation to output and employment cycles. Our univariate analysis suggests that, in general, the dominant cycle followed by output, employment, real consumer and producer wages and their components is 5–7 years. Consistent with previous findings reported in the macro-level literature, our bi-variate results show that the various measures of the wage are generally not linked to the employment cycle. However, and in sharp contrast with previous macro-level studies we find strong procyclical links between the consumer wage and its overtime components and the output cycle, especially at the 5–7 years frequency.

Observed real wages are not constant over the cycle, but neither do they exhibit consistent pro- or counter-cyclical movements. This suggests that any attempt to assign systematic real wage movements a central role in an explanation of business cycles is doomed to failure. (lucas 1977)