Conventional RBC models have been heavily criticized for their inability to generate the estimated negative correlations of hours and productivity in response to technology shocks ('productivity-hours puzzle'). In this paper we show that by just enhancing the standard frame- work with investment...

Why is there a negative correlation between business cycles in Jordan and the EU15? This paper explores the hypothesis that TFP increases in Europe spill over to Jordan only if embodied in FDI, but that European TFP growth negatively affects the Jordanian economy through higher world interest...

This study demonstrates that the interactions of firm-level indivisible investments give rise to aggregate fluctuations without aggregate exogenous shocks. When investments are indivisible, aggregate capital is determined by the number of firms that invest. I develop a method to derive the...

Typically real-business-cycle models are assessed by their ability to mimic the covariances and variances of actual business cycle data. Recently, however, advocates of RBC models have used them to fit the historical path of real GDP using the Solow residual as a driving process. We demonstrate...

A recent paper by Young (2004) demonstrated that biased technical changes, in the form of shocks to labor's share/elasticity, can drive economically large fluctuations in a real business cycle (RBC) model. We examine the cyclical properties of 4 quarterly measures of US labor's share from 1959...

The traditional argument against the relevance of sector-specific shocks for the aggregate phenomenon of business cycles invokes the law of large numbers: positive shocks in some sectors are offset by negative shocks in other sectors. This paper hypothesizes that the law of large numbers may be...