Postwar Slowdowns and Long-Run Growth: A Bayesian Analysis of Structural-Break Models

Yi-Chi Chen and Eric Zivot
Additional contact information
Yi-Chi Chen: Department of Economics, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan
Eric Zivot: University of Washington

Working Papers from University of Washington, Department of Economics

Abstract: Using Bayesian methods, we re-examine the empirical evidence from Ben-David, Lumsdaine and Pappell (“Unit Roots, Postwar Slowdowns and Long-Run Growth: Evidence from Two Structural Breaks”, Empirical Economics, 28, 2003) regarding structural breaks in the long-run growth path of real output series for a number of OECD countries. Our Bayesian framework allows the number and pattern of structural changes in trend and variance to be endogenously determined. We find little evidence of postwar growth slowdowns across countries, and we find smaller output volatility for most of the developed countries after the end of World War II. Our empirical findings are consistent with neoclassical growth models, which predict increasing growth over the long run. The majority of the countries we analyze have grown faster in the postwar era as opposed to the period before the first break.

Date: 2008-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Forthcoming in Empirical Economics

Downloads: (external link)
http://faculty.washington.edu/ezivot/research/ChenZivot_final.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:udb:wpaper:uwec-2008-21-fc

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Washington, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael Goldblatt ().