Business cycle stylized facts and inventory behaviour: New evidence for the Euro area

Tatiana Cesaroni, Louis Maccini () and Marco Malgarini ()

International Journal of Production Economics, 2011, vol. 133, issue 1, 12-24

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is for the first time to use Business Tendency Survey data, first, to identify new facts that are useful for the interpretation of the decline in the volatility of real activity in the Euro area, and, second, to test the inventory management hypothesis as an explanation for the Great Moderation in Europe. We present stylized facts from the Business Tendency data on series for inventories, current production, current orders, and expected production for the Euro area, emphasizing the decline in the volatility of the series. Further, we investigate whether the decline in inventory volatility can be attributed to an endogenous change in the persistence of shocks to the accumulation dynamics of inventories or to an exogenous change in the shocks hitting the inventory optimisation process. Our results at Euro level generally indicate that there is no evidence of a break in the inventory accumulation process. On the contrary, the impact of exogenous shocks on inventory volatility appears to be steadily declining over time, beginning from the mid-1980s.

Keywords: Business; cycle; stylized; facts; Inventory; behaviour; European; Business; Tendency; Survey; data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527310002902
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Business cycle volatility and inventories behavior:new evidence for the Euro Area (2009)
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:eee:proeco:v:133:y:2011:i:1:p:12-24

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Economics is currently edited by Stefan Minner

More articles in International Journal of Production Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().