Research Database

Business cycles appear to be large, persistent, and asymmetric relative to the shocks hitting the economy. This observation suggests the existence of an asymmetric amplification and propagation mechanism, which transforms the shocks into the observed movements in aggregate output. This article demonstrates, in a small open economy, how credit constraints can be such a mechanism. The article also shows, however, that the quantitative significance of the amplification which credit constraints can provide is sensitive to the quantitative specification of the underlying economy (especially factor shares).

One critical aspect of economic development is that productivity growth and a rising standard of living are realized through more roundabout methods of production and increasing specialization of intermediate inputs and producer services. We use an extended version of the Judd-Grossman-Helpman model of dynamic monopolistic competition to show that an economy that inherits a small range of specialized inputs can be trapped into a lower stage of development. The limited availability of specialized inputs forces the final goods producers to use a labor intensive technology, which in turns implies a small inducement to introduce new intermediate products. The start-up costs, which make the intermediate goods producers subject to dynamic increasing returns, and pecuniary externalities that result from the factor substitution in the final goods sector, play essential roles in the model.

Applied macroeconomists interested in identifying the sources of business cycle fluctuations typically have no more than 40 or 50 years of data at a quarterly frequency. With sample sizes that small, identification may not be possible even with correctly specified representations of the data. In this article, I investigate whether small samples are indeed a problem for some commonly used statistical representations. I compare three—a vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA), an unrestricted state space, and a restricted state space—that are all consistent with the same prototype business cycle model. The statistical representations that I consider differ in the amount of a priori theory that is imposed, but all are correctly specified. I find that the identifying assumptions of VARMAs and unrestricted state space representations are too minimal: the range of estimates for statistics of interest for business cycle researchers is so large as to be uninformative.

This paper discusses at an undergraduate level how forecast rationality can be tested. It explains that forecasters should correctly use any relevant information they knew in making their predictions. It shows that forecast rationality can be tested by determining whether the forecasters' prediction errors are predictable. After addressing what data and methods can be used for testing rationality, the paper presents tests of the price-forecast rationality of individual professional forecasters. Unlike results of previous studies, the test results show that those forecasters' price predictions appear to be rational.

This article analyzes some of the potential effects of increased international financial integration within a simple two-country model. In the model, the article considers a switch in the menu of internationally traded financial securities from bonds to complete contingent claims and examines the impact of this switch on the stochastic properties, including the cross-country correlations, of standard macroeconomic aggregates like output, consumption, and labor effort, as well as the trade balance.