Real Business Cycle Model Research Articles

Cyclical Asset Returns in the Consumption and Investment Goods Sector

We document the empirical fact that asset prices in the consumption-goods and investment-goods sector behave almost identically in the US economy. In order to derive the cyclical behavior of the equity returns in these two sectors, we consider a standard two-sector real-business cycle model with habit formation and sector-specific adjustment costs of capital. The model is able to replicate the equity premium and the Sharpe values observed empirically. In addition, we are able to match the empirical fact that equity returns in the two sectors are not correlated with output.

IMPERFECT TRANSMISSION OF TECHNOLOGY SHOCKS AND THE BUSINESS CYCLE CONSEQUENCES

We investigate the business cycle effects of imperfect transmission of technology shocks within a basic real business cycle (RBC) model along two dimensions. First, we assume that agents cannot distinguish a temporary increase in productivity growth from a sustained increase in the underlying growth rate of productivity and instead must conduct signal extraction exercises and update beliefs about the source of aggregated shocks. Second, we propose a technology adjustment cost resulting in the slow diffusion of technological innovations into the production process. Both of these impediments to the transmission of technology result in a large initial wealth effect, increasing investment and hours less, relative to the usual RBC model without these frictions. Furthermore, each of these features is capable of producing a decline in hours on impact of the technology shock matching the negative response in hours found in the data by such works as Gali [American Economic Review89(1), 249–271 (1999)].

Observing Shocks

Macroeconomists have observed business cycle fluctuations over time by constructing and manipulating models in which shocks have increasingly played a greater role. Shock is a term of art that pervades modern economics appearing in nearly one-quarter of all journal articles in economics and in nearly half in macroeconomics. Surprisingly, its rise as an essential element in the vocabulary of economists can be dated only to the early 1970s. We trace the history of shocks in macroeconomics from Ragnar Frisch and Eugen Slutsky in the 1920s and 1930s through real business cycle and DSGE models and to the use of shocks as generators of impulse-response functions, which are in turn used as data in matching estimators. The history is organized around the observability of shocks. As well as documenting a critical conceptual development in economics, the history of shocks shows that James Bogen and James Woodward’s distinction between data and phenomena must be substantially relativized if it is to be at all plausible.

Credit Risk and Disaster Risk

Credit spreads are large, volatile and countercyclical, and recent empirical work suggests that risk premia, not expected credit losses, are responsible for these features. Building on the idea that corporate debt, while safe in ordinary recessions, is exposed to economic depressions, this paper embeds a trade-off theory of capital structure into a real business cycle model with a small, exogenously time-varying risk of economic disaster. The model replicates the level, volatility and cyclicality of credit spreads, and variation in the corporate bond risk premium amplifi es macroeconomic ‡fluctuations in investment, employment and GDP.

Trans‐Tasman Transmission of Government Spending Shocks

This paper investigates the international transmission of fiscal shocks between two closely‐linked, open economies. We estimate impulse response functions using a semi‐structural vector auto regressive (VAR) model and quarterly data from Australia and New Zealand for the period 1973:3–2008:4. We compare our empirical results with impulse response functions from a calibrated two‐country international real business cycle model with habit formation and adjustment costs to investment. We show that a positive shock to Australian government consumption leads to an increase in Australian output initially and then to a decline in the medium term, while the New Zealand output is negatively affected both in the short and medium term. This result is in line with the recent literature that reports beggar‐thy‐neighbour effect of positive government spending shocks.

How Well Do Linear Approximation Methods Work? Results for Suboptimal Dynamic Equilibria

Real business cycle models have recently been applied to settings in which equilibria are suboptimal. In most models the solutions are approximated using some type of linearization with little attention being given to the accuracy of the approximation. In this paper we investigate three different approximation methods in the context of a neoclassical model with a production tax and compare their solutions with solutions obtained from a discrete state space solution to the Euler equations of the model.

Robust animal spirits

In a real business cycle model, an agent's fear of model misspecification interacts with stochastic volatility to induce time varying worst case scenarios. These time varying worst case scenarios capture a notion of animal spirits where the probability distributions used to evaluate decision rules and price assets do not necessarily reflect the fundamental characteristics of the economy. Households entertain a pessimistic view of the world and their pessimism varies with the overall level of volatility in the economy, implying an amplification of the effects of volatility shocks. By using perturbation methods and Monte Carlo techniques we extend the class of models analyzed with robust control methods to include the sort of nonlinear production-based DSGE models that are popular in academic research and policymaking practice.

Some unpleasant general equilibrium implications of executive incentive compensation contracts

Abstract We consider a simple real business cycle model in which shareholders hire self-interested executives to manage their firm. A generic family of compensation contracts similar to those employed in practice is studied. When compensation is convex in the firmʼs dividend, an increase in the firmʼs output results in a more than proportional increase in the managersʼ income. Incentive contracts of sufficient yet modest convexity are shown to result in an indeterminate general equilibrium, one in which business cycles are driven by self-fulfilling fluctuations in managersʼ expectations. The proposed family of contracts may yield first-best outcomes for specific parameter choices.

Financial Conditions, Capital Shortage and Jobless Recovery

This paper explores how financial frictions and financial shocks can contribute to jobless recoveries. We incorporate financial frictions and financial shocks into a real business cycle model in which firms determine not only their investment in capital and employment of workers, but also capital-utilization rates and hours worked per worker. In the model, firms' investment and wage payment are restricted by a borrowing constraint, and the tightness of the constraint is determined by both financial conditions and the amount of collateral - capital stock. In a recovery, in response to a positive TFP shock, firms increase their capital utilization, but whether they invest more in capital depends on how fast financial conditions improve. If the financial conditions improve slowly, firms keep their investment low. This leads to a persistent shortage of capital and a jobless recovery.

Disaster Risk and Business Cycles

Motivated by the evidence that risk premia are large and countercyclical, this paper studies a tractable real business cycle model with a small risk of economic disaster, such as the Great Depression. An increase in disaster risk leads to a decline of employment, output, investment, stock prices, and interest rates, and an increase in the expected return on risky assets. The model matches well data on quantities, asset prices, and particularly the relations between quantities and prices, suggesting that variation in aggregate risk plays a significant role in some business cycles. (JEL E13, E32, E44, G32)

Macroeconomic Implications of the Underground Sector: Challenging the Double Business Cycle Approach

Within the literature on business cycles featuring underground activities, there is an approach based on the arguable premise that these are countercyclical. This paper develops a real business cycle model without such an assumption. Preferences are additively separable in formal and underground labor. Further, leisure time is spent on irregular work and non-market activities. Simulations permit examining how the model performs and comparing the results with related findings. Also, computational experiments allow analyzing the effects of taxes, enforcement and tastes for underground labor on aggregate fluctuations. These experiments offer a comprehensive view of the cyclical implications of the shadow economy.

On expectations‐driven business cycles in economies with production externalities: A comment

Eusepi (2009, International Journal of Economic Theory 5, pp. 9–23) analytically finds that a one‐sector real business cycle model may exhibit positive co‐movement between consumption and investment when the equilibrium wage‐hours locus is positively sloped and steeper than the household’s labor supply curve. However, we show that this condition does not imply that expectations‐driven business cycles will emerge in Eusepi's model. Specifically, a positive news shock about future productivity improvement leads to an aggregate recession whereby output, employment, consumption and investment all fall in the announcement period.

International business cycle co-movement and vertical specialization reconsidered in multistage Bayesian DSGE model

Business cycle co-movements across countries have been widely documented, and East Asian economies show no exception. We reevaluate a Bayesian estimated two-country real business cycle model with non-sequentially traded intermediates and a New Keynesian model that incorporates simple vertical specialization using trade-weighted observable series of nine East and Southeast Asian economies. Unsurprisingly, counterfactual co-movements are generated. The failure of these models, we argue, stems from the inappropriate formalization of vertical linkage in production and trade. By extending a two-country New Keynesian model with three processing stages to authentically embrace vertical specialization in the form of vertical and processing trade, we show that the Bayesian estimated model is capable of replicating satisfactorily the business cycle co-movements over a large set of macroeconomic variables. And the quantitative ability survives a battery of sensitivity analysis. We thus infer that formalizing vertical and sequential linkage in production through the lens of three processing stages is a fruitful exercise for an international business cycle model to solve trade-comovement puzzle.

The Evolution of Endogenous Business Cycles

This paper distinguishes between two kinds of Endogenous Business Cycle models, and discusses the evolution from first generation EBC1 models to second generation EBC2 models. I argue that EBC1 models, which display dynamic indeterminacy, are part of the evolution of modern macroeconomics that has classical roots dating back to the 1920s. EBC2 models, which display steady-state indeterminacy, are a more radical departure from the classical Real Business Cycle model; they represent a return to one of the most important ideas to emerge from Keynes’ (1936) General Theory; that high involuntary unemployment can persist as part of the steady-state equilibrium of a market economy.

Real Business Cycles Versus Financial Frictions Models for Small Open Economies

Is a real business cycle model extended with non-stationary technology shocks able to describe small open economies or are credit market imperfections necessary in addition? This study addresses this question by providing evidence of the relative ability of a model with and without financial frictions to replicate the data for 12 emerging and 12 developed small open economies. Our main finding is that including fi nancial frictions improves the fit of the model in all the studied emerging market economies and only in 5 developed small open economies. Also, we find that permanent technology shocks are relatively more important in emerging market economies expanding the analysis in Aguiar and Gopinath (2007). In the process of comparing models, we provide a set of parameter estimates for a large set of countries that could serve as a guide for future studies.

A NOTE ON THE REAL EFFECTS OF MONETARY SHOCKS: A LIMITED PARTICIPATION MODEL

This paper presents a monetary stochastic general equilibrium model that allows the real cyclical movements of the economy to be explained as a consequence of exogenous monetary, public spending, and technology shocks. The model is calibrated and simulated, and its accuracy in replicating the cyclical movements in the real variables is compared with that of the standard real business cycle (RBC) model. We find that our model fits the observed data better than the existing RBC models, especially for the labor market.

Equity Returns and Business Cycles in Small Open Economies

This is the first paper in the DSGE literature to match key business cycle moments and long-run equity returns in a small open economy with production. These results are achieved by introducing four modifications to a standard real business cycle model: (1) borrowing and lending costs are imposed to increase the volatility of the marginal rate of substitution over time; (2) capital adjustment costs are assumed to make equity returns more volatile; (3) GHH preferences are employed to smooth consumption and (4) a working capital constraint to generate countercyclical trade balances. Our results are based on data from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.

Neutral Technology Shocks and Employment Dynamics: Results Based on an RBC Identification Scheme

This paper studies the dynamic response of labour input to neutral technology shocks. It uses a standard real business cycle model enriched with labour market search and matching frictions and investment-specific technological progress that enables a new, agnostic, identification scheme based on sign restrictions on an SVAR. The estimation supports an increase of labour input in response to neutral technology shocks. This finding is robust across different perturbations of the SVAR model. The model is extended to allow for time-varying volatility of shocks and the identification scheme is used to investigate the importance of neutral and investment-specific technology shocks to explain the reduced volatility of U.S. macroeconomic variables over the past two decades. Neutral technology shocks are found to be more important than investment-specific technology shocks.

External Financing and the Role of Financial Frictions over the Business Cycle: Measurement and Theory

We examine the quantitative importance of financial market shocks in accounting for business cycle fluctuations. We emphasize the role financial markets play in reallocating funds from cash-rich, low productivity firms to cash-poor, high productivity firms. We use evidence on financial flows to analyze the importance of this role of financial markets. This evidence shows that in the aggregate, funds available to firms internally are more than adequate to finance investment. At the firm level, we find that for publicly traded firms (in Compustat), almost all investment is financed internally while, using a alternative data source (Amadeus), we find that most investment by privately held firms is financed through borrowing. These observations suggest that the quantitative impact of financial market shocks depend both on the sensitivity of investment and output of privately held firms to such shocks and on the extent to which the investment and output of publicly held firms respond to the actions of privately held firms. Motivated by these observations, we build a quantitative model featuring publicly and privately held firms that face collateral constraints and idiosyncratic risk over productivity. We model financial market shocks as shocks to the collateral constraints. In our model, each firm has a monopoly in producing a differentiated good and uses the goods produced by other firms as an input for production -- features that create non-financial linkages between publicly and privately held firms. In our calibrated model, we find that a shock to the collateral constraints which generates a one standard deviation decline in the debt-to-asset ratio leads to a 0.5% decline in aggregate output on impact, roughly comparable to the effect of a one standard deviation shock to aggregate productivity in a standard real business cycle model. In this sense, we find that disturbances in financial markets are a promising source of business cycle luctuations when non-financial linkages across firms are sufficiently strong.

INTRODUCTION: DYNAMIC STOCHASTIC GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM MODELLING AND THE STUDY OF ASIA‐PACIFIC ECONOMIES

INTRODUCTION: DYNAMIC STOCHASTIC GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM MODELLING AND THE STUDY OF ASIA‐PACIFIC ECONOMIES