How Important Are Terms of Trade Shocks

Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe and Martín Uribe ()

No 1700, 2016 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: According to conventional wisdom, terms of trade shocks represent a major source of business cycles in emerging and poor countries. This view is largely based on the analysis of calibrated business-cycle models. We argue that the view that emerges from empirical SVAR models is strikingly different. We estimate country-specific SVARs us- ing data from 38 poor and emerging countries and find that terms-of-trade shocks ex- plain only 10 percent of movements in aggregate activity. We then build a fully-fledged, open economy model with three sectors, importables, exportables, and nontradables, and use data from each of the 38 countries to obtain country-specific estimates of key structural parameters, including those defining the terms-of-trade process. In the es- timated theoretical business-cycle models terms-of-trade shocks explain on average 30 percent of the variance of key macroeconomic indicators, three times as much as in SVAR models.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: How Important Are Terms Of Trade Shocks? (2015)
Working Paper: How Important Are Terms Of Trade Shocks? (2015)
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:red:sed016:1700

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2016 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().