Until recently, economists widely believed that economic activity had become less variable in the United States following the end of World War II. Challenging this belief, new research suggests that key historical time series are spuriously volatile, a finding that is highly controversial. Data from the stock market may provide a vehicle for resolving the controversy. Economic theory relates stock prices to real activity; empirical tests also show a strong link between stock prices and activity. Financial data are accurately measured over long spans of time and hence are free of most of the measurement problems in other time series. Measures of stock prices show no stabilization in the post-World War II period relative to the pre-World War I or pre-Depression periods. These stock market data thus support the hypothesis that real activity has not been stabilized.
JEL Classification: 131, 133, 313
Keywords: Business cycle, Fluctuations, Stabilization, Stock market, Economic activity
What shocks account for the business cycle frequency and long run movements of output and prices? This paper addresses this question using the identifying assumption that only supply shocks, such as shocks to technology, oil prices, and labor supply affect output in the long run. Real and monetary aggregate demand shocks can affect output, but only in the short run. This assumption sufficiently restricts the reduced form of key macroeconomic variables to allow estimation of the shocks and their effect on output and price at all frequencies. Aggregate demand shocks account for about twenty to thirty percent of output fluctuations at business cycle frequencies. Technological shocks account for about one-quarter of cyclical fluctuations, and about one-third of output’s variance at low frequencies. Shocks to oil prices are important in explaining episodes in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Shocks that permanently affect labor output account for the balance of fluctuations in output, namely, about half of its variance at all frequencies.
JEL Classification: 131, 133, 134, 023
Keywords: Business cycle, Supply shocks, Inflation, Output, Demand shocks
Non-competitive conduct can be assessed by estimating the size of the markup or Lerner index achieves in a market. The markup implies a price elasticity of demand faced by the representative firm. For a given markup, non-competitive conduct that is insensitive tot he value of the monopoly. To implement this measure, both the firm’s and the market elasticities of demand must be estimated. Hall shows how to estimate the markup, and hence the elasticity faced by the firm, from the cyclical behavior of productivity. To estimate the market elasticity, an instrumental variables procedure exploiting a covariance restriction between productivity shocks and demand shocks is used. Results for broad sectors of private industry and for non-durable manufacturing industries display a wide range of monopoly power.
Supply shocks played an important role in macroeconomic fluctuations during the 1970’s. Supply shocks are also increasingly important in Keynesian and neo-classical models of the business cycle. This paper is a short survey of these theoretical models. It also discusses the history of supply shocks in recent business cycles.
JEL Classification: 023, 131
Keywords: Supply shocks, Macroeconomic fluctuations, Business cycles
Measured productivity is strongly procyclical. Real business cycle theories suggest that actual fluctuations in productivity are the source of fluctuations in aggregate output. Keynesian theories maintain that fluctuations in aggregate output come from shocks to aggregate demand. Keynesian theories appeal to labor hoarding or off the production function behavior to explain the procyclicality of productivity. If observed productivity shocks are true productivity shocks, a function of factor prices should covary exactly with productivity. In annual data for United States industries, that function of factor prices and conventionally-measured productivity move together very closely. Moreover, their difference is uncorrelated with aggregate output.
JEL Classification: 131, 023, 825
Keywords: Business cycles, Macroeconomic Fluctuations, Productivity, Aggregate demand, Factor prices
A firm may acquire additional capital input by purchasing new capital or by increasing the utilization of its current capital. The margin between capita accumulation and capital utilization is studied in a model of dynamic factor demand where the firm chooses capital, labor, and their rates of utilization. A direct measure of capital utilization — the work week of capital — is incorporated into the theory and estimates. The methodology advocated by Hansen and Singleton (1982) is used to obtain estimates of the model’s parameters. This methodology allows the firm’s decision problem to depend on expected values of future endogenous and exogenous functional form or the distribution of shocks to the system. The estimates imply that capital stock is costly to adjust while the work week of capital is essentially costless to adjust. Hence, the work week of capital overshoots the steady state when innovations in policy or other shocks change the demand for capital. Short run variation in the demand for capital is met by changing utilization. Long run variation is met by changing the stock. The estimated response of the capital stock to changes in its price and in the required rate of return is substantial and it takes place more quickly than found in other estimates. These results provide an important challenge to the view that input prices and required rates of return are empirically unimportant in models of the demand for capital.
A model of the dynamically interrelated demand for capital and labor is specified and estimated. The estimates are of the first-order conditions of the firm’s problem rather than of the closed-form decision rules. This use of the first-order conditions allows a random rate of return and a flexible specification of the technology. The estimates do not imply the very slow rates of adjustment displayed in other, related estimates of the demand for capital. Because adjustment is estimated to be rapid, there is, contrary to the standard view, scope for factor-prices to affect investment at relatively high frequencies.