Inventories, Stockouts, and ToTEM

Oleksiy Kryvtsov and Yang Zhang

Discussion Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: Inventory investment is an important component of the Canadian business cycle. Despite its small average size – less than 1 per cent of output -- it exhibits volatile procyclical fluctuations, accounting for almost one-third of output variance. Procyclicality of inventories is somewhat smaller than that of sales, resulting in a counter-cyclical aggregate inventory-sales ratio. These salient inventory facts are matched in a partialequilibrium version of Kryvtsov and Midrigan’s (2010) model in which firms hold stocks of goods to buffer against stockouts. In booms, firms boost their inventories to avoid stocking out due to the rise in demand. The model combines the real marginal cost estimated by ToTEM with the convex cost of adjusting inventories to match the dynamics of the inventory-sales ratio in the data.

Keywords: Business fluctuations and cycles; Transmission of monetary policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E31 E32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cba and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/dp10-8.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:bca:bocadp:10-8

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Bank of Canada 234 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0G9, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().