Inventories and business cycle volatility: an analysis based on ISAE survey data

Marco Malgarini ()

No 84, ISAE Working Papers from ISTAT - Italian National Institute of Statistics - (Rome, ITALY)

Abstract: The paper looks at an often debated issue - the decline observed in business cycle volatility - from a rather original point of view represented by careful consideration of qualitative data deriving from Business Tendency Surveys. It first concentrates on the manufacturing sector, providing evidence that volatility slowdown is attributable to a break in the Data Generating Process rather than to a long trend decline. Moreover, it shows that lower variance of the ISAE Confidence Indicator is mostly explained by the behaviour of firms’ assessments of demand and inventories. In particular, inventories volatility has decreased, while volatility of production has instead increased with respect to that of demand. Both of these results are consistent with the claim that better inventories management should have a specific role in shaping the production decisions of the firms.

Keywords: Inventories; business cycle; business cycle volatility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 E22 E32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2007-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://lipari.istat.it/digibib/Working_Papers/WP_84_2007_Malgarini.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Inventories and Business Cycle Volatility: An Analysis Based on ISAE Survey Data (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:isa:wpaper:84

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISAE Working Papers from ISTAT - Italian National Institute of Statistics - (Rome, ITALY) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stefania Rossetti ().