Real Business Cycle Research Articles

Sentiments and Real Business Cycles

We introduce sentiments under incomplete information into an otherwise standard real business cycle model. Individual firms receive signals about their idiosyncratic demand shocks which are confounded by sentiments. Sentiments coordinate optimal decisions of individuals through their extraction of the aggregate economic conditions from the signals. We show that there exists a sentiment-driven rational expectations equilibrium in addition to a fundamental equilibrium. Optimistic sentiments boost the aggregate economy, leading to positive comovements among output, consumption, investment, and hours worked. We calibrate a full-blown dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model based on U.S. aggregate data and find that sentiment shocks substantially amplify the aggregate fluctuations.

Real Business Cycles in Emerging Countries: Are Asian Business Cycles Different from Latin American Business Cycles?

Real Business Cycles in Emerging Countries: Are Asian Business Cycles Different from Latin American Business Cycles?

Business Cycles and Environmental Policy: Literature Review and Policy Implications

We study the relationship between business cycles and the design and effects of environmental policies, particularly those with economy-wide significance like climate policies. First, we provide a brief review of the literature related to this topic, from initial explorations using real business cycle models to New Keynesian extensions, open-economy variations, and issues of monetary policy and financial regulations. Next, we provide a list of the main findings that emerge from this literature that are potentially most relevant to policymakers, including the impacts of policy on volatility and how to design policy to adjust to cycles. Finally, we propose several important remaining research questions.

Imperfect Learning and Neglected Long Run Economic Constraints

This paper shows that an economy with unobservable preference shocks can be temporarily explosiveif adaptive learning agents focus on short run optimization but ignore long run constraints. However,when agents slowly learn that the economy will not be sustainable under the explosive path, they canrestore the economy to a stationary process by changing their current consumption decisions. Withoutany structural changes, these temporarily explosive dynamics lead to more volatile and longer fluctuationsof the consumption to capital ratio compared to those of real business cycle models focusing on highfrequency economic fluctuations. Since these fluctuations are not optimal responses to structural changes,this paper provides policy suggests to prevent these sub-optimal fluctuations of the consumption to capitalratio.

Инвестиции в инфраструктуру Сибири и Дальнего Востока. Анализ макроэкономических эффектов на основе модели общего равновесия

We have developed a general equilibrium model that belongs to the class of real business cycle models of a small open economy exporting natural resources, which allows us to take into account the impact of investments in infrastructure projects. The model was calibrated to perform deterministic simulation of the investments project of the new railway construction and associated enterprises for the extraction and primary processing of natural resources in Siberia and the Far East. We use the information available before 2018. By 2050, the contribution of the infrastructure project, with a total size of 2.3% of GDP, to GDP growth is estimated at 4.0%, and the largest contribution of 2.7% of GDP is made by the growth of natural resource exports by 31.6 billion US dollars. 29.4 billion US dollars import increase and 7.2% consumption increase are due to the 5.4% of real ruble appreciation by 2050. The long-term equivalent consumption variation of the project is estimated as 8.36% a year. The project leads to an exacerbation of the Dutch disease of the Russian economy: the country’s specialization in the production and export of natural resources increases, imports increase, exports of other goods decrease, consumption increases, currency appreciates, and labor supply decreases.

Diagnostic Expectations and Macroeconomic Volatility

Diagnostic expectations have emerged as an important departure from rational expectations in macroeconomics and finance. We present a first treatment of diagnostic expectations in linear macroeconomic models. To this end, we establish a strong additivity property for diagnostic expectations. The solution method and stability properties are discussed in full generality. Under some conditions, diagnostic expectations generate higher volatility than rational expectations. We show that this is true in standard New Keynesian models, as in medium-scale DSGE models; in real business cycle models output and investment are char- acterized by dampening, instead. Finally, we discuss how the combination of diagnosticity with imperfect information can rationalize under- and over-reaction in macroeconomics.

Macro-Financial Trends in a Model with Concentrated Ownership of Capital

This paper investigates the macroeconomic and asset pricing consequences of the upward trend in financial market participation observed in the U.S. since the late 1980s. In a limited participation two-agent Real Business Cycle model where stockholders feature external habit preferences, higher participation produces an increase in the average equity premium and in stock market volatility, while reducing the risk-free rate and the standard deviation of aggregate consumption. When coupled with a lower volatility of aggregate shocks, this mechanism helps rationalizing a period characterized by milder aggregate fluctuations but increased perceived risk in asset markets, such as the Great Moderation. I show that these results stem from a novel mechanism whereby an increase in the participation rate improves risk-sharing but raises the representative investor's average risk-aversion, with the latter channel dominating the former. Using household-level data on consumption from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey for the sample 1984-2017, I show that the risk-aversion channel is consistent with the empirical evidence.

The implementation of stabilization policy

In locally linearized dynamic stochastic rational‐expectations models, I introduce the concepts of feasible paths (paths on which the policy instrument can be expressed as a function of the policymaker's observation set) and implementable paths (paths that can be obtained, in a minimally robust way, as the unique local equilibrium under a policy‐instrument rule consistent with the policymaker's observation set). I show that, for relevant observation sets, the optimal feasible path under monetary policy can be non‐implementable in the new Keynesian model, while constant‐debt feasible paths under tax policy are always implementable in the real business cycle model. The first result sounds a note of caution about one of the main lessons of the new Keynesian literature, namely the importance for central banks to track some key unobserved exogenous rates of interest, while the second result restores to some extent the role of income or labor‐income taxes in safely stabilizing public debt. For any given implementable path, I show how to design arithmetically a policy‐instrument rule consistent with the policymaker's observation set and implementing this path as the robustly unique local equilibrium.

Aggregate dynamics and microeconomic heterogeneity: the role of vintage technology

We study how the timing of technology adoption through capital accumulation shapes firm-level productivity dynamics and quantify its aggregate implications in a model of heterogeneous firms. Using data on the census of incorporated Italian firms and exploiting the lumpiness of capital accumulation, we document that large investment episodes lead to productivity gains at the firm and sectoral level due to vintage effects. In a general equilibrium model of firm heterogeneity, we find that the presence of vintage technology constitutes a powerful microeconomic-based amplification mechanism of aggregate shocks relative to a benchmark real business cycle model.

The rebuilding macroeconomic theory project part II: multiple equilibria, toy models, and policy models in a new macroeconomic paradigm

AbstractThis issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy is the second in the Rebuilding Macroeconomic Theory project. The papers in the first issue proposed specific improvements to the New-Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (NK-DSGE) framework, in response to the events of the 2008 crisis. This issue goes further. We, as editors, now argue that a new multiple-equilibrium and diverse (MEADE) paradigm is needed for macroeconomics. It will emphasize that economies can have more than one stable outcome, and study why. It will require using both toy models, which enable a quick, first-pass, intuitive understanding of a question, and policy models (aka structural economic models) which develop a detailed empirical understanding of the economy. We argue that the seminal IS/LM, Solow–Swan, Ramsey, Real Business Cycle, Taylor, and Clarida/Galí/Gertler models have all been toys, as is the benchmark NK-DSGE model. In the past the models have adapted as the questions changed, and the NK-DSGE model must now do this since it has failed to capture both the salient aspects of the lead-up to the 2008 crisis and the slow recovery afterwards. The way forward in the MEADE paradigm will be to start with simple models, ideally two-dimensional sketches, that explain mechanisms that can cause multiple equilibria. These mechanisms should then be incorporated into larger DSGE models in a new, multiple-equilibrium synthesis. All of this will need to be informed by closer fidelity to the data, drawing on lessons obtained from detailed work on policy models.

Costly default and skewed business cycles

We augment a simple Real Business Cycle model with financial intermediaries that may default on their liabilities and a financial friction generating social costs of default. We derive a closed-form solution for the general equilibrium of the economy, providing analytical results. Endogenous default generates a negative skew for aggregate variables and a positive skew for credit spreads, as documented in the empirical literature. Larger financial frictions strengthen asymmetry, which amplifies the welfare cost of fluctuations. Macro-prudential regulation alleviates both the cost of fluctuations and business-cycle asymmetry, at the expense of a steady-state distortion. Finally, we prove analytically the existence of an optimal level of regulation, which increases with the size of the financial friction.

Endogenous business cycles with financial frictions

ABSTRACT This paper uncovers a series of belief shocks that drive the U.S. economy from both financial markets data and a financial accelerator model with self-fulfiling prophecies. Indeterminacy in the economy does not require externalities or increasing returns in production but it arises from an endogenous and countercyclical markup channel. The computed belief shocks are well identified and resemble the observable proxy in the real world. The model-driven solely by belief shocks performs well on replicating major U.S. business cycle facts. The belief-driven model contains a strong internal propagation mechanism and has more forecasting ability than a standard real business cycle model disturbed by technology shocks.

Common Trade Exposure and Business Cycle Comovement

<ns2:p>A large empirical literature has shown that countries that trade more with each other have more correlated business cycles. We show that previous estimates of this relationship are biased upward because they ignore common trade exposure to other countries. When we account for common trade exposure to foreign business cycles, we find that (1) the effect of bilateral trade on business cycle comovement falls by roughly 25 percent and (2) common exposure is a significant driver of business cycle comovement. A standard international real business cycle model is qualitatively consistent with these facts but fails to reproduce their magnitudes. Past studies have used models that allow for productivity shock transmission through trade to strengthen the relationship between trade and comovement. We find that productivity shock transmission increases business cycle comovement largely because of a country-pair's common trade exposure to other countries rather than because of bilateral trade. When we allow for stronger transmission between small open economies than other country-pairs, comovement increases both from bilateral trade and common exposure, similar to the data.</ns2:p>

Welfare Cost of Model Uncertainty in a Small Open Economy.

This paper extends the canonical small open-economy real-business-cycle model, when considering model uncertainty. Domestic households have multiplier preferences, which leads them to take robust decisions in response to possible model misspecification for the economy’s aggregate productivity. Using perturbation methods, the paper extends the literature on real business cycle models by deriving a closed-form solution for the combined welfare effect of the two sources of uncertainty, namely risk and model uncertainty. While classical risk has an ambiguous effect on welfare, the addition of model uncertainty is unambiguously welfare-deteriorating. Hence, the overall effect of uncertainty on welfare is ambiguous, depending on consumers preferences and model parameters. The paper provides numerical results for the welfare effects of uncertainty measured by units of consumption equivalence. At moderate (high) levels of risk aversion, the effect of risk on household welfare is positive (negative). The addition of model uncertainty—for all levels of concern about model uncertainty and most risk aversion values—turns the overall effect of uncertainty on household welfare negative. It is important to remark that the analytical decomposition and combination of the effects of the two types of uncertainty considered here and the resulting ambiguous effect on overall welfare have not been derived in the previous literature on small open economies.

Remeasuring and decomposing stochastic trends in business cycles

This paper is motivated by the fact that the standard deviation of cyclical TFP derived from the standard approach under the stochastic trend is not even close to the real-world data. The main part of the paper devotes to developing a new method to apply geometric Brownian motion to characterize TFP in continuous time and converting it to an estimated process of random walk with drift. As a result, the drift estimate together with the lagged TFP in the random walk process are the stochastic trend of TFP and the stochastic error term in the random walk with drift process is the cyclical component of TFP. I then have two findings: the first one is that the standard deviation of cyclical TFP derived from the new approach is much closer to the real-world data; the second one is that stochastic trend of TFP can be decomposed into three parts: an initial value, a deterministic trend, and a term involved with Weiner process. Moreover, this paper argues that, by recalculating the business cycle statistics based on a rational expectations model, if we remeasure the stochastic trend and cyclical component of TFP using the new approach, then the ability of real business cycle model to mimic real-world economic fluctuations will be significantly improved.

Energy Efficiency Package for Tenant Fit-Out: Laboratory Testing and Validation of Energy Savings and Indoor Environmental Quality

Approximately 40% of the total U.S. office floor space of 1.5 billion sq.m (16 billion sq.ft.) is leased space occupied by tenants. Tenant fit-out presents a key opportunity to incorporate energy efficiency within the real estate business cycle. We designed a package of energy efficiency measures tailored to the scope of a tenant fit-out. This tenant fit-out package (TFP) includes advanced lighting and heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) controls as core measures, with ceiling fans, automated shading, and plug load controls as additional optional measures. We conducted laboratory testing of six configurations of the package to evaluate energy savings, indoor environmental quality, and identify installation, commissioning, and operational issues. Combined savings for HVAC, lighting, and plug loads ranged from 33–40%. Lighting savings ranged from 69–83%, and HVAC savings from 20–40%. The laboratory testing also revealed some minor but tractable challenges with installation and commissioning of HVAC controls. Overall, the results demonstrate that significant savings can be realized in existing office buildings by incorporating relatively low-risk, proven measures at the time of a tenant fit-out.

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON HENRY LUDWELL MOORE’S USE OF HARMONIC ANALYSIS

This paper reconsiders the contribution of Henry Ludwell Moore to dynamic economics through the use of harmonic analysis. We show that Moore’s analysis is innovative in its use of the Fourier transformation for the identification of cycles with different periodicities. This enables Moore to identify cycles of longer length with more precision than would be the case for the standard methodology. We are able to replicate the main features of his results and confirm the existence of a rainfall cycle with a periodicity similar to that of the business cycle (eight years). However, we find that the evidence for a longer (thirty-three-year) rainfall cycle is weaker than Moore indicates. We also argue that a central theme of Moore’s analysis—the relationship among rainfall, agricultural productivity, and the business cycle—marks an early precursor of the “real business cycle” approach. George Stigler’s (1962) dismissal of Moore’s work on cycles as “a complete failure” is therefore, in our opinion, unfair. Instead, we argue that, although his work is certainly flawed, it nevertheless deserves a place in both the history of business cycle theory and empirical economics.

Property Rights, Expropriations, and Business Cycles in China

Real business cycles in China are different than in many other countries, including consumption being more volatile than output and uncorrelated with investment. To study whether Chinese institutions can account for these features, we expand the standard real business cycle model with private and state-owned enterprises facing time-to-build constraints, expropriations, and government expenditures. We introduce shocks to each of these activities and estimate our model with Bayesian techniques. The model matches the salient data moments quite closely, with expropriations playing a central role. In particular, shocks to expropriations account for over 70% of consumption and output volatility, and over 60% of private investment volatility. To assess whether our estimated expropriations are empirically plausible, we show that: (i) the model-generated expropriation series is highly correlated with a commonly used measure of property rights; (ii) the explanatory power of expropriations drops considerably after 2012, coinciding with the government's anti-corruption campaign; and (iii) a placebo test estimating the model for the U.S. finds expropriations to be about an eight of those in China, and to account for only a small share of the U.S. aggregate fluctuations.

An RBC model with non-Ricardian households: lessons for Bulgaria (1999–2018)

PurposeThe authors introduce non-Ricardian (“hand-to-mouth”) myopic agents into an otherwise standard real-business-cycle (RBC) setup augmented with a detailed government sector. The authors investigate the quantitative importance of the presence of nonoptimizing households for cyclical fluctuations in Bulgaria.Design/methodology/approachThe authors calibrate the RBC model to Bulgarian data for the period following the introduction of the currency board arrangement (1999–2018).FindingsThe authors find that the inclusion of such non-Ricardian households improves model performance along several dimensions and generally provides a better match vis-a-vis data, as compared to the standard model populated with Ricardian agents only.Originality/valueThis is a novel finding in the macroeconomic studies on Bulgaria using modern quantitative methods.

Gender differences in the volatility of work hours and labor demand

This paper examines the role of heterogeneity in a real business cycle model, which traditionally has not fully captured the relative volatility of hours to output. Men and women have different cyclical volatilities in hours worked, which is robust to different filtering methods. This empirical regularity is used to motivate a standard RBC model augmented to allow for two different agents following Jaimovich et al. (2013). These two agents have identical utility functions, but face different elasticities of labor demand due to their different complementarities with capital. These estimated elasticities find that women are more complementary to capital. The calibrated model generates the cyclical volatility of work hours by gender and for the total hours worked that matches the U.S. data better than the traditional representative agent model. I then explore other extensions to this model including investigating the stability of the estimated labor demand elasticities and allowing for various Frisch elasticities of labor supply. This paper demonstrates that allowing for even broad levels of heterogeneity in a simple framework can increase the model’s tractability with the data. Since gender is important to explain U.S. business cycle dynamics, we need to carefully consider heterogeneity when analyzing counter-cyclical economic policy, as it may not have symmetric effects across assorted groups.