The delayed response to a technology shock: a flexible price explanation

Robert Vigfusson

No 810, International Finance Discussion Papers from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: I present empirical evidence of how the U.S. economy, including per-capita hours worked, responds to a technology shock. In particular, I present results based on permanent changes to a constructed direct measure of technological change for U.S. manufacturing industries. Based on empirical evidence, some claim that hours worked declines and never recovers in response to a positive technology shock. This paper's empirical evidence suggests that emphasizing the drop in hours worked is misdirected. Because the sharp drop in hours is not present here, the emphasis rather should be on the small (perhaps negative) initial response followed by a subsequent large positive response. Investment, consumption, and output have similar dynamic responses. In response to a positive technology shock, a standard flexible price model would have an immediate increase in hours worked. Therefore, such a model is inconsistent with the empirical dynamic responses. I show, however, that a flexible price model with habit persistence in consumption and certain kinds of capital adjustment costs can better match the empirical responses. Some recent papers have critiqued the use of long run VARs to identify the dynamic responses to a technology shock. In particular they report that, when long run VARs are applied to data simulated from particular economic models, the point estimates of the impulse responses may be imprecisely estimated. However, based on additional simulation evidence, I find that, although the impact response may be imprecisely estimated, a finding of a delayed response is much more likely when the true model response also has a delayed response.

Keywords: Technology - Economic aspects; Hours of labor; Mathematical models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2004/810/default.htm (text/html)
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2004/810/ifdp810.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:fip:fedgif:810

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in International Finance Discussion Papers from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier ().