We argue that the behavior of manufacturing inventories provides evidence against models of business cycle fluctuations based on productivity shocks, increasing returns to scale, or favorable externalities, whereas it is consistent with models with short-run diminishing returns. Finished goods...

Manufacturers' finished goods inventories are less cyclical than shipments. This requires marginal cost to be more procyclical than is conventionally measured. In this paper, alternative marginal cost measures for six manufacturing industries are constructed. These measures, which attribute...