The paper reports the principal findings of a long term research project on the description and explanation of business cycles. The research strongly confirmed the older view that business cycles have large systematic components that take the form of investment cycles. These quasi-periodic...

The paper reports the principal findings of a long term research project on the description and explanation of business cycles. The research strongly confirmed the older view that business cycles have large systematic components that take the form of investment cycles. These quasi-periodic...

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...

We study the effects of news shocks on inventory accumulation in a structural VAR framework. We establish that inventories react strongly and positively to news about future increases in total factor productivity. Theory suggests that the transmission channel of news shocks to inventories works...

Business cycle models are often investigated by using reduced form time series models, other than (or in alternative to) structural highly grounded in economic theory models. Reduced form VARMA with fixed parameters play a key role in business cycle analysis, but it is often found that by their...

This paper uses several procedures to date and analyze the Brazilian business cycle and growth cycle. In particular, a Markov switching model is fitted to quarterly and annual real production data. The smoothed probabilities of the Markov states are used as predictive rules to define different...

The paper reports the principal findings of a long term research project on the description and explanation of business cycles. The research strongly confirmed the older view that business cycles have large systematic components that take the form of investment cycles. These quasi-periodic...

Recent studies using long-run restrictions question the validity of the technology driven real business cycle hypothesis. We propose an alternative identification that maximizes the contribution of technology shocks to the forecast-error variance of labor productivity at a long, but finite,...

This paper discusses the paper "The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions" by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...

This paper discusses the paper 'The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions' by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...