The paper looks at an often debated issue - the decline observed in business cycle volatility - from a rather original point of view represented by careful consideration of qualitative data deriving from Business Tendency Surveys. It first concentrates on the manufacturing sector, providing...

Why did the volatility of U.S. real GDP decline by more than the volatility of final sales with the Great Moderation in the mid-1980s? One explanation is that firms shifted their inventory behavior towards a greater emphasis on production smoothing. We investigate the role of inventories in the...

This paper presents a New Keynesian DSGE model with inventory holding firms. The model distinguishes between goods and materials, for both production as well as for inventories. The more detailed treatment of inventory holdings offers new insights into the determinants of business cycles before...