Recent empirical and theoretical research on business inventories is surveyed and critically evaluated. While most inventory research has had macroeconomic motivations, we focus on its microtheoretic basis and on potential conflicts between theory and evidence. The paper asks two principal...

Empirical and theoretical aspects of inventory behavior became hot topics in the 1950s and early 1960s. No one seemed to notice the tension that was developing between the emerging macroeconomic and microeconomic views of inventories. Macroeconomists routinely thought of inventories as a...

This paper has two purposes. One is to assess different models of inventory behavior in terms of their ability to well approximate the realized data on inventories. We do this initially for the pure production smoothing model and then for a sequence of generalizations of the model. Our analysis...

Empirically, ADF tests fail to reject the null hypothesis that sales are I(1). We build a model of inventory behavior that incorporates permanent sales shocks. Analytically, the model with I(1) sales implies that the variance ratio (of log production to log sales) is one in the long run,...

This paper builds and estimates a new model of firm behavior that includes decisions to order, use, and stock input materials in a stage-of-fabrication environment with either gross production or value added technology. The model extends the traditional linear-quadratic model of output (finished...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model that integrates inventory and labor decisions. We extend a model of inventory behavior to include a detailed specification of the role of labor input in the production process and of the costs associated with it. In particular, we distinguish...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model that integrates inventory and labor decisions. We extend a model of inventory behavior to include a detailed specification of the role of labor input in the production process and of the costs associated with it. In particular, we distinguish...