What's News in Business Cycles / Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe, Martin Uribe.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schmitt-Grohe, Stephanie.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Uribe, Martin.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w14215.

NBER working paper series no. w14215

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2008.

Summary:

In this paper, we perform a structural Bayesian estimation of the contribution of anticipated shocks to business cycles in the postwar United States. Our theoretical framework is a real-business-cycle model augmented with four real rigidities: investment adjustment costs, variable capacity utilization, habit formation in consumption, and habit formation in leisure. Business cycles are assumed to be driven by permanent and stationary neutral productivity shocks, permanent investment-specific shocks, and government spending shocks. Each of these shocks is buffeted by four types of structural innovations: unanticipated innovations and innovations anticipated one, two, and three quarters in advance. We find that anticipated shocks account for more than two thirds of predicted aggregate fluctuations. This result is robust to estimating a variant of the model featuring a parametric wealth elasticity of labor supply.

Notes:

Print version record

August 2008.