The Return to Capital and the Business Cycle

Paul Gomme, B Ravikumar and Peter Rupert ()

Review of Economic Dynamics, 2011, vol. 14, issue 2, 262-278

Abstract: A widely cited failing of real business cycle models is their inability to account for the cyclical patterns of ?nancial variables. Perhaps less well known is the fact that the return to capital and equity are identical in the neoclassical growth model. This paper constructs a measure of the return to business capital for the U.S. The S&P 500 return is roughly six times more volatile than the return to business capital. Owing to the equivalence between the returns to capital and equity in the neoclassical growth model, papers in the real business cycle literature that successfully account for the time series variation in the S&P 500 return must fail to account for the time series properties of the return to capital. A fairly basic real business cycle model captures most of the observed variability in the return to capital. What is needed is a theory of the stock market that breaks the equivalence between the returns to equity and capital. (Copyright: Elsevier)

Keywords: Real business cycle; Volatility; Return to capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E0 E1 E2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (154)

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Working Paper: The Return to Capital and the Business Cycle (2007)
Working Paper: The return to capital and the business cycle (2006)
Working Paper: The Return to Capital and the Business Cycle (2006)
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DOI: 10.1016/j.red.2010.11.004

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