Standard real business cycle theory predicts that consumption should be smoother than output, as observed in developed countries. In emerging economies, however, consumption is more volatile than income. In this paper the authors provide a novel explanation of this phenomenon, the ‘consumption...

American politics have become increasingly polarized in recent decades. To the extent that political polarization introduces uncertainty about economic policy, this pattern may have adversely affected the economy. According to existing theories, a rise in the volatility of fiscal shocks faced by...

We are motivated by four stylized facts computed for emerging and developed economies: (i) business cycle movements are wider in emerging countries; (ii) economies in emerging countries experience greater economic policy uncertainty; (iii) emerging economies are more polarized and less...

We construct a two-country DSGE model with multiple stages of processing and local-currency staggered price-setting to study cross-country quantity correlations driven by monetary shocks. The model embodies a mechanism that propagates a monetary surprise in the home country to lower the foreign...

The authors develop an equilibrium business cycle model in which final goods producers pursue generalized (S,s) inventory policies with respect to intermediate goods, a consequence of nonconvex factor adjustment costs. Calibrating their model to reproduce the average inventory-to-sales ratio in...

Using an equilibrium business cycle model, the authors search for aggregate nonlinearities arising from the introduction of nonconvex capital adjustment costs. The authors find that while such adjustment costs lead to nontrivial nonlinearities in aggregate investment demand, equilibrium...

This paper proposes evaluating the assumptions of the RBC model rather than merely the ability of model-constrained data to mach moments of official data counterparts. Reduced-form relationships can be used to create model-consistent derivations of capital and labor input. Since several...

We search for useful models of aggregate fluctuations with inventories. We focus exclusively on dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models that endogenously give rise to inventory investment and evaluate two leading candidates: the (S,s) model and the stockout avoidance model. Each model is...

Since the 1950s the Bureau of Economic analysis (BEA) has grouped the states into eight regions based primarily on cross-sectional similarities in their socioeconomic characteristics. This is the most frequently used grouping of states in the U.S. for economic analysis. Since several recent...