scholarly journals The Aggregate Implications of Regional Business Cycles

Econometrica ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 87 (6) ◽  
pp. 1789-1833 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Beraja ◽  
Erik Hurst ◽  
Juan Ospina

Making inferences about aggregate business cycles from regional variation alone is difficult because of economic channels and shocks that differ between regional and aggregate economies. However, we argue that regional business cycles contain valuable information that can help discipline models of aggregate fluctuations. We begin by documenting a strong relationship across U.S. states between local employment and wage growth during the Great Recession. This relationship is much weaker in U.S. aggregates. Then, we present a methodology that combines such regional and aggregate data in order to estimate a medium‐scale New Keynesian DSGE model. We find that aggregate demand shocks were important drivers of aggregate employment during the Great Recession, but the wage stickiness necessary for them to account for the slow employment recovery and the modest fall in aggregate wages is inconsistent with the flexibility of wages we observe across U.S. states. Finally, we show that our methodology yields different conclusions about the causes of aggregate employment and wage dynamics between 2007 and 2014 than either estimating our model with aggregate data alone or performing back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations that directly extrapolate from well‐identified regional elasticities.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (061) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cashin ◽  
◽  
Jamie Lenney ◽  
Byron Lutz ◽  
William Peterman ◽  
...  


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Del Negro ◽  
Marc Giannoni ◽  
Frank Schorfheide


2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Hoynes ◽  
Douglas L Miller ◽  
Jessamyn Schaller

In this paper, we examine how business cycles affect labor market outcomes in the United States. We conduct a detailed analysis of how cycles affect outcomes differentially across persons of differing age, education, race, and gender, and we compare the cyclical sensitivity during the Great Recession to that in the early 1980s recession. We present raw tabulations and estimate a state panel data model that leverages variation across U.S. states in the timing and severity of business cycles. We find that the impacts of the Great Recession are not uniform across demographic groups and have been felt most strongly for men, black and Hispanic workers, youth, and low-education workers. These dramatic differences in the cyclicality across demographic groups are remarkably stable across three decades of time and throughout recessionary periods and expansionary periods. For the 2007 recession, these differences are largely explained by differences in exposure to cycles across industry-occupation employment.



Author(s):  
Laurence Seidman

This work analyzes all aspects of a new policy to combat recession: “stimulus without debt.” Fear of deficits and debt kept Congress from enacting a large enough fiscal stimulus to overcome the Great Recession that began in 2008, and this fear is likely to restrict fiscal stimulus in the next severe recession. “Stimulus without debt” is a new policy that would increase aggregate demand for goods and services in a recession without increasing government debt. Stimulus without debt consists of a transfer (not loan) from the central bank to the national Treasury (or to national treasuries in the case of the eurozone) so that the Treasury does not have to borrow to finance fiscal stimulus enacted by the legislature. In the United States, Congress would enact a fiscal stimulus package that consists mainly of cash tax rebates to households but also other temporary expenditures and temporary tax cuts; the fiscal stimulus would raise aggregate demand. The Federal Reserve would use new money to give a large transfer (not loan) to the Treasury equal to the fiscal stimulus package so that the Treasury does not have to borrow to pay for the package. Hence, there would be no increase in government debt.



2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Christiano ◽  
Martin S. Eichenbaum ◽  
Mathias Trabandt

We argue that the vast bulk of movements in aggregate real economic activity during the Great Recession were due to financial frictions. We reach this conclusion by looking through the lens of an estimated New Keynesian model in which firms face moderate degrees of price rigidities, no nominal rigidities in wages, and a binding zero lower bound constraint on the nominal interest rate. Our model does a good job of accounting for the joint behavior of labor and goods markets, as well as inflation, during the Great Recession. According to the model the observed fall in total factor productivity and the rise in the cost of working capital played critical roles in accounting for the small drop in inflation that occurred during the Great Recession. (JEL E12, E23, E24, E31, E32, E52)







2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Ortiz ◽  
Vicente Salas-Fumás

Purpose With Spanish Community Innovation Survey data, this paper tests two main hypotheses as explanation of the fall in business innovation output in the Great Recession: the aggregate demand effect (firms have lower propensity to initiate innovation projects in recession than in contraction from demand-pull and profit expectations effects) and the risk effect (a greater proportion of the initiated projects fail in recessions than in expansions). Design/methodology/approach The research methodology consists on first modelling the decision by firms to initiate innovation projects in t or not (probit model), and, second, modelling the outcomes, success or failure in t + 1 of firms that decide to initiate (Heckman model). Findings The empirical results support the two hypotheses. They also indicate that the sensitivity of the decision to initiate innovation projects to the aggregate demand is more pronounced among financially constrained firms than among unconstrained ones, while the risk effect appears to be independent of the financial situation of firms. Research limitations/implications The results of the research are limited by not being able to follow up individual innovation projects, and by not having available a more representative sample of firms where non-innovators and potential innovators are represented (now is biased toward potential innovators). Practical implications The results highlight the importance of macroeconomic stability for sustained business innovation output over time and calls managers’ attention in better management of innovation risk. Social implications The results of the paper recommend macroeconomic polies aimed at the stabilization of aggregate demand and smoothing the business cycle, as a way to contribute to the stabilization of the growth of innovation output over time. Monetary and fiscal policies that smooth the business cycle will then have significant effects in the stabilization of innovation output and, in turn, in the reduction of volatility of economic growth over time. Increasing the direct public financial aid to undertake innovation projects in recession periods will not have the same innovation output stabilization effect than the stabilization of the aggregate demand. The reason is that, as the paper points out, the innovation output of financially unconstrained firms is also affected negatively by the contraction of aggregate demand in recession periods. Originality/value This paper is the first one to investigate the differences in business innovation outputs in expansions and recessions, separating the aggregate demand and the risk effect that the organisation for economic co-operation and development identifies as main determinants of the fall in innovation output during the Great Recession. The decomposition of firms’ innovation output in the decision to initiate innovation projects and the likelihood that those initiated succeed is also new in the literature.



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