Permanent and Transitory Components in Macroeconomic Fluctuations

N. Gregory Mankiw and John Campbell

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

Abstract: Fluctuations in real GNP have traditionally been viewed as transitory deviations from a deterministic time trend. The purpose of this paper is to review some of the recent developments that have led to a new view of output fluctuations and then to provide some additional evidence. Using post-war quarterly data, it is hard to reject the view that real GNP is as persistent as a random walk with drift.We also consider the hypothesis that the recent finding of persistence are due to the failure to distinguish the business cycle from other fluctuations in real GNP. We use the measured unemployment rate to decompose output fluctuations. We find no evidence for the view that business cycle fluctuations are more quickly trend-reverting.

Date: 1987
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (93)

Published in American Economic Review

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3207697 ... manenttransitory.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Permanent and Transitory Components in Macroeconomic Fluctuations (1987)
Working Paper: Permanent and Transitory Components in Macroeconomic Fluctuations (1987)
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:hrv:faseco:3207697

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().