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What do inventories tell us about news-driven business cycles?

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  • Crouzet, Nicolas
  • Oh, Hyunseung

Abstract

There is widespread disagreement over the quantitative contribution of news shocks to business-cycle fluctuations. This paper provides a simple identifying restriction, based on inventory dynamics, that tightly pins down this contribution. Structural models predict that finished-good inventories should fall when there is an increase in consumption and investment induced by news shocks. A structural VAR with these sign restrictions indicates that news shocks account for at most 20 percent of output volatility. Since inventories comove positively with consumption and investment in the data, shocks that generate negative comovement cannot account for the bulk of fluctuations.

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  • Crouzet, Nicolas & Oh, Hyunseung, 2016. "What do inventories tell us about news-driven business cycles?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 49-66.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:moneco:v:79:y:2016:i:c:p:49-66
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jmoneco.2016.03.005
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    5. Danilo Cascaldi-Garcia, 2022. "Forecast Revisions as Instruments for News Shocks," International Finance Discussion Papers 1341, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    6. Marcel Förster, 2014. "An Empirical Analysis of Business Cycles in a New Keynesian Model with Inventories," MAGKS Papers on Economics 201413, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung).
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    9. Ramey, V.A., 2016. "Macroeconomic Shocks and Their Propagation," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 71-162, Elsevier.
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