Business cycle accounting

Last updated

Business cycle accounting is an accounting procedure used in macroeconomics to decompose business cycle fluctuations into contributing factors. The procedure was introduced by V. V. Chari, Patrick Kehoe, and Ellen McGrattan but is similar to techniques introduced earlier. The underlying premise of the procedure is that the economy has a long run trajectory which is perturbed by various frictions. These are called wedges and the earliest version of the procedure includes a productivity wedge, a labor wedge, an investment wedge and a government consumption wedge. Business cycle accounting decomposes fluctuations in macroeconomic variables, such as GDP or employment, into fluctuations of each of these wedges (and their combinations).

Business cycle accounting has been done for various countries and various periods of time. The procedure suggests for the United States after World War II most fluctuation in GDP is due to fluctuations in the productivity and labor wedges.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Macroeconomics</span> Study of an economy as a whole

Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes regional, national, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP and national income, unemployment ,price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IS–LM model</span> Macroeconomic model relating interest rates and asset market

IS–LM model, or Hicks–Hansen model, is a two-dimensional macroeconomic tool that shows the relationship between interest rates and assets market. The intersection of the "investment–saving" (IS) and "liquidity preference–money supply" (LM) curves models "general equilibrium" where supposed simultaneous equilibria occur in both the goods and the asset markets. Yet two equivalent interpretations are possible: first, the IS–LM model explains changes in national income when the price level is fixed in the short-run; second, the IS–LM model shows why an aggregate demand curve can shift. Hence, this tool is sometimes used not only to analyse economic fluctuations but also to suggest potential levels for appropriate stabilisation policies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Economic growth</span> Measure of increase in market value of goods

Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of increase in the real and nominal gross domestic product (GDP).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New Keynesian economics</span> School of macroeconomics

New Keynesian economics is a school of macroeconomics that strives to provide microeconomic foundations for Keynesian economics. It developed partly as a response to criticisms of Keynesian macroeconomics by adherents of new classical macroeconomics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business cycle</span> Intervals of expansion and recession in economic activity

Business cycles are intervals of expansion followed by recession in economic activity. A recession is sometimes technically defined as 2 quarters of negative GDP growth, but definitions vary; for example, in the United States, a recession is defined as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales." The changes in economic activity that characterize business cycles have implications for the welfare of the broad population as well as for private institutions. Typically business cycles are measured by examining trends in a broad economic indicator such as Real Gross Domestic Production.

Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production process, i.e. output per unit of input, typically over a specific period of time. The most common example is the (aggregate) labour productivity measure, one example of which is GDP per worker. There are many different definitions of productivity and the choice among them depends on the purpose of the productivity measurement and data availability. The key source of difference between various productivity measures is also usually related to how the outputs and the inputs are aggregated to obtain such a ratio-type measure of productivity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Macroeconomic model</span> Model used in Macroeconomics

A macroeconomic model is an analytical tool designed to describe the operation of the problems of economy of a country or a region. These models are usually designed to examine the comparative statics and dynamics of aggregate quantities such as the total amount of goods and services produced, total income earned, the level of employment of productive resources, and the level of prices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Bureau of Economic Research</span> American private nonprofit research organization

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic community". The NBER is known for providing start and end dates for recessions in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward C. Prescott</span> American economist (1940–2022)

Edward Christian Prescott was an American economist. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with Finn E. Kydland, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". This research was primarily conducted while both Kydland and Prescott were affiliated with the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University. According to the IDEAS/RePEc rankings, he was the 19th most widely cited economist in the world in 2013. In August 2014, Prescott was appointed an Adjunct Distinguished Economic Professor at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia. Prescott died of cancer on November 6, 2022, at the age of 81.

Procyclical and countercyclical variables are variables that fluctuate in a way that is positively or negatively correlated with business cycle fluctuations in gross domestic product (GDP). The scope of the concept may differ between the context of macroeconomic theory and that of economic policy–making.

Domar aggregation is an approach to aggregating growth measures associated with industries to make larger sector or national aggregate growth rates. The issue comes up in the context of national accounts and multifactor productivity (MFP) statistics.

Seasonal adjustment or deseasonalization is a statistical method for removing the seasonal component of a time series. It is usually done when wanting to analyse the trend, and cyclical deviations from trend, of a time series independently of the seasonal components. Many economic phenomena have seasonal cycles, such as agricultural production, and consumer consumption. It is necessary to adjust for this component in order to understand underlying trends in the economy, so official statistics are often adjusted to remove seasonal components. Typically, seasonally adjusted data is reported for unemployment rates to reveal the underlying trends and cycles in labor markets.

Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modeling is a macroeconomic method which is often employed by monetary and fiscal authorities for policy analysis, explaining historical time-series data, as well as future forecasting purposes. DSGE econometric modelling applies general equilibrium theory and microeconomic principles in a tractable manner to postulate economic phenomena, such as economic growth and business cycles, as well as policy effects and market shocks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New classical macroeconomics</span> School of thought in macroeconomics

New classical macroeconomics, sometimes simply called new classical economics, is a school of thought in macroeconomics that builds its analysis entirely on a neoclassical framework. Specifically, it emphasizes the importance of rigorous foundations based on microeconomics, especially rational expectations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jordi Galí</span> Spanish economist

Jordi Galí is a Spanish macroeconomist who is regarded as one of the main figures in New Keynesian macroeconomics today. He is currently the director of the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and a Research Professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. After obtaining his doctorate from MIT in 1989 under the supervision of Olivier Blanchard, he held faculty positions at Columbia University and New York University before moving to Barcelona.

The real exchange-rate puzzles is a common term for two much-discussed anomalies of real exchange rates: that real exchange rates are more volatile and show more persistence than what most models can account for. These two anomalies are sometimes referred to as the purchasing power parity puzzles.

Robert Shimer is an American macroeconomist and labor economist who currently holds the Alvin H. Baum Chair in the Economics Department of the University of Chicago. He was an editor of the Journal of Political Economy from 2004 to 2012. His research focuses on the search and matching approach to labor economics. He is especially known for arguing that the standard labor market matching model predicts fluctuations in the unemployment rate much smaller than those actually observed over the business cycle, an observation which has sometimes been called the Shimer puzzle. His book Labor Markets and Business Cycles was published in 2010 by Princeton University Press, and was recommended by Robert Hall:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New neoclassical synthesis</span> Fusion of macroeconomic schools of thought

The new neoclassical synthesis (NNS), which is now generally referred to as New Keynesian economics, and occasionally as the New Consensus, is the fusion of the major, modern macroeconomic schools of thought – new classical macroeconomics/real business cycle theory and early New Keynesian economics – into a consensus view on the best way to explain short-run fluctuations in the economy. This new synthesis is analogous to the neoclassical synthesis that combined neoclassical economics with Keynesian macroeconomics. The new synthesis provides the theoretical foundation for much of contemporary mainstream macroeconomics. It is an important part of the theoretical foundation for the work done by the Federal Reserve and many other central banks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Real business-cycle theory</span> Macroeconomic model

Real business-cycle theory is a class of new classical macroeconomics models in which business-cycle fluctuations are accounted for by real shocks. Unlike other leading theories of the business cycle, RBC theory sees business cycle fluctuations as the efficient response to exogenous changes in the real economic environment. That is, the level of national output necessarily maximizes expected utility, and governments should therefore concentrate on long-run structural policy changes and not intervene through discretionary fiscal or monetary policy designed to actively smooth out economic short-term fluctuations.

Ellen McGrattan is an American macroeconomist who is Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota and past director of the Heller-Hurwicz Economics Institute, and consults for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

References