Solving, Calibrating, and Simulating the Benchmark Real Business Cycle Model

In this paper the benchmark real business cycle model (Prescott, 1986) is solved using the fully recursive method by Binder and Pesaran (1997). The model economy is then calibrated on the US data (1954-1982), defined consistently with the variables of the standard model. To evaluate the model's ability of replicating observations also with respect to their cyclical component, the statistical properties of the simulated series are compared with the stylized facts of the US economy, obtained detrending the data with the Hodrick-Prescott filter. The results indicate that, although it is an over-simplified description of the economic activity, the model proves to be surprisingly capable of replicating the fundamental properties of actual business cycles