Most traditional explanations for the decreasing aggregate output volatility - so-called "Great Moderation" - fail to accommodate, or even directly contradict, another aspect of empirical data: the average sales volatility for publicly-traded US firms has been increasing during the same period....

How different are retailers' inventory levels around the world? Specifically, are retailers' inventories constant across countries, converging, or at least co-integrating? These might be viewed as various forms of global determinism. To see which of these forms hold, I use a novel dataset...

This paper estimates technology growth using several variants of the Hall (1988, 1990) method on data for Swedish two-digit manufacturing industries. More specifically, I first apply and evaluate two different approaches to control for varying factor utilization developed by Basu et al. (1998)...

We study the relationship between technology shocks and labor input on Swedish firm-level data using a production function approach to identify technology shocks. Taking standard steps yields a contractionary contemporaneous labor-input response in line with previous studies. This finding may,...

RThis paper proposes a novel decomposition of aggregate productivity to evaluate the role of resource reallocation for the cyclical dynamics of aggregate productivity. The decomposition, which is derived from the aggregation of heterogeneous firm-level production functions, accounts for changes...

This article develops the relationships among real business cycle (RBC) theory, Austrian business cycle (ABC) theory, and Minsky's financial instability hypothesis (FIH). In RBC models, recessions are caused on the supply side by random technology shocks which are independent of monetary policy....

Given the rapid rise and volatility of oil prices, the paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on the South African manufacturing production using monthly observations covering the period 1974:02 to 2012:12. In addition, we quantify the responses of manufacturing production to...

In this paper, we measure the main factors explaining nominal output growth and deviations from trend output in Switzerland over the period 1980 to 2001. The decompositions are based on the GDP function and its dual, the national income function. The results indicate that whereas nominal output...

From a theoretical perspective, the output gap is probably the most comprehensive and convincing concept to describe the cyclical position of an economy. Unfortunately, for practical purposes, the concept depends on the determination of potential output, which is an inherently unobservable...

This study investigates the impact of the current financial crisis on Canada’s potential GDP growth. Using a simple accounting framework to decompose trend GDP growth into changes in capital, labour services, and total factor productivity, we find a sizeable drop in Canadian potential growth...