Inventory investment, one of the more volatile components of gross domestic product, is often considered to be a major contributor to aggregate fluctuation. A review of previous work by Blinder and Maccini (1991) on the stylized facts of inventory investment confirms that, over the business...

For more than half a century, inventory investment has attracted wide attention as a major cause of short-term macroeconomic fluctuations, and the mechanisms involved have been the focus of many major studies. Yet microeconomists and business people familiar with corporate behavior have...