Demand and productivity components of business cycles: Estimates and implications

Frédéric Dufourt

Macroeconomics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Standard stochastic growth models provide theoretical restrictions on output decomposition which can be used to investigate whether productivity shocks played a major role in observed business cycles. Applying these restrictions to US data leads to the following findings: i) Business cycles implied by productivity shocks are mildly correlated to overall fluctuations and help account for a few episodes of US postwar recessions. However, only 20% of US fluctuations can be explained by these shocks. ii) Most fluctuations seem instead to be due to "nominal demand" shocks, i.e. shocks which move output and prices in the same direction, but whose effects on output are ultimately transitory. iii) Canonical sticky price models in the New-Neoclassical Synthesis tradition can account for the cyclical comovements of output and prices, but canonical, frictionless, RBC models cannot.

Keywords: Business cycles; technological shocks; demand shocks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 C52 E32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-01-08, Revised 2005-11-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-dge and nep-mac
Note: Type of Document - pdf
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/mac/papers/0501/0501013.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Demand and Productivity Components of Business Cycles: Estimates and Implications (2006)
Journal Article: Demand and productivity components of business cycles: Estimates and implications (2005)
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:wpa:wuwpma:0501013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Macroeconomics from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA (volker.schallehn@ub.uni-muenchen.de this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).