Measures of Technology and the Short-Run Responses to Technology Shocks - Is the RBC-Model Consistent with Swedish Manufacturing Data?

This paper estimates technology growth using several variants of the Hall (1988, 1990) method on data for Swedish two-digit manufacturing industries. More specifically, I first apply and evaluate two different approaches to control for varying factor utilization developed by Basu et al. (1998) and Burnside et al. (1995). Second, I propose a generalization of the latter specification. Finally, the cyclical behavior of the resulting technology measure is studied and the responses of hours and output to a technology shock are estimated using a variant of the standard VAR-approach. The main finding is that a positive technology shock has, on impact, a contractionary effect on hours and non-expansionary effect on output. This finding is inconsistent with the predictions of the standard real business cycle model.