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Seasonality, Cost Shocks and the Production Smoothing Model of Inventories

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Author Info
Jeffrey A. Miron
Stephen P. Zeldes

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Abstract

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the empirical behavior of inventories. A great deal of this research examines some variant of the production smoothing model of finished goods inventories. The overall assessment of this model that exists in the literature is quite negative: there is little evidence that manufacturers hold inventories of finished goods in order to smooth production patterns.

This paper examines whether this negative assessment of the model is due to one or both of two features: costs shocks and seasonal fluctuations. The reason for considering costs shocks is that if firms are buffetted more by cost shocks than demand shocks, production should optimally be more variable than sales. The reasons for considering seasonal fluctuations are that seasonal fluctuations account for a major portion of the variance in production and sales, that seasonal fluctuations are precisely the kinds of fluctuations that producers should most easily smooth, and that seasonally adjusted data is likely to produce spurious rejections of the production smoothing model even when it is correct. .

We integrate cost shocks and seasonal fluctuations into the analysis of the production smoothing model in three steps. First, we present a general production smoothing model of inventory investment that is consistent with both seasonal and non-seasonal fluctuations in production, sales, and inventories. The model allows for both observable and unobservable changes in marginal costs. Second, we estimate this model using both seasonally adjusted and seasonally unadjusted data plus seasonal dummies. The goal here is to determine whether the incorrect use of seasonally adjusted data has been responsible for the rejections of the production smoothing model reported in previous studies. The third part of our approach is to explicitly examine the seasonal movements in the data. We test whether the residual from an Euler equation is uncorrelated with the seasonal component of contemporaneous sales. Even if unobservable seasonal cost shocks make the seasonal variation in output greater than that in sales, the timing of the resulting seasonal movements in output should not necessarily match that of sales.

The results of our empirical work provide a strong negative report on the production smoothing model, even when it includes cost shocks and seasonal fluctuations. At both seasonal and non-seasonal frequencies, there appears to be little evidence that firms hold inventories in order to smooth production. A striking piece of evidence is that in most industries the seasonal in production closely matches the seasonal in shipments, even after accounting for the movements in interest rates, input prices, and the weather.

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Paper provided by Wharton School Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research in its series Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research Working Papers with number 1-87.

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Handle: RePEc:fth:pennfi:1-87

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References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Edward C. Prescott, 1986. "Theory ahead of business cycle measurement," Quarterly Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, issue Fall, pages 9-22. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  2. Blanchard, Olivier J, 1983. "The Production and Inventory Behavior of the American Automobile Industry," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 91(3), pages 365-400, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  3. Lawrence J. Christiano & Martin S. Eichenbaum, 1986. "Temporal Aggregation and Structural Inference in Macroeconomics," NBER Technical Working Papers 0060, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  4. Blinder, Alan S, 1986. "More on the Speed of Adjustment in Inventory Models," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 18(3), pages 355-65, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  5. Schutte, David P, 1983. "Inventories and Sticky Prices: Note," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(4), pages 815-16, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  6. West, Kenneth D., 1983. "A note on the econometric use of constant dollar inventory series," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 13(4), pages 337-341. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  7. Hansen, Lars Peter & Singleton, Kenneth J, 1983. "Stochastic Consumption, Risk Aversion, and the Temporal Behavior of Asset Returns," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 91(2), pages 249-65, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  8. Irvine, F Owen, Jr, 1981. "Retail Inventory Investment and the Cost of Capital," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(4), pages 633-48, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  9. Stephen Zeldes, . "Consumption and Liquidity Constraints: An Empirical Investigation," Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research Working Papers 24-85, Wharton School Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research.
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  10. Mankiw, N. Gregory, 1981. "The permanent income hypothesis and the real interest rate," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 7(4), pages 307-311. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  11. Blinder, Alan S, 1986. "Can the Production Smoothing Model of Inventory Behavior Be Saved?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 101(3), pages 431-53, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  12. Ghali, Moheb A, 1987. "Seasonality, Aggregation and the Testing of the Production Smoothing Hypothesis," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 77(3), pages 464-69, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  13. Blinder, Alan S. & Fischer, Stanley, 1981. "Inventories, rational expectations, and the business cycle," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(3), pages 277-304. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  14. West, Kenneth D, 1986. "A Variance Bounds Test of the Linear Quadratic Inventory Model," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 94(2), pages 374-401, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  15. Sargent, Thomas J, 1978. "Rational Expectations, Econometric Exogeneity, and Consumption," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 86(4), pages 673-700, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
Full references

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(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Pindyck, Robert S., 1990. "Inventories and the short-run dynamics of commodity prices," Working papers 3133-90., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  2. Kenneth D. West, 1989. "Order Backlogs and Production Smoothing," NBER Working Papers 2385, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Donald S. Allen, 1997. "Do inventories moderate fluctuations in output?," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Jul, pages 39-50. [Downloadable!]
  4. Svend Hylleberg, 2006. "Seasonal Adjustment," Economics Working Papers 2006-04, School of Economics and Management, University of Aarhus. [Downloadable!]
  5. Marzio Galeotti & Louis J Maccini & Fabio Schiantarelli, 2002. "Inventories Employment and Hours," Economics Working Paper Archive 473, The Johns Hopkins University,Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  6. Marcel Fafchamps Jan Willem Gunning & Remco Oostendorp, . "Inventories, Liquidity, and Contractual Risk in African Manufacturing," Working Papers 97020, Stanford University, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
  7. Donald S. Allen, 1999. "Seasonal production smoothing," Working Papers 1999-004, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
  8. Bartholomew Moore & Louis J Maccini & Huntley Schaller, 2002. "The Interest Rate Learning and Inventory Investment," Economics Working Paper Archive 512, The Johns Hopkins University,Department of Economics, revised Apr 2004. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  9. Daniele Coen-Pirani, 2004. "Markups, Aggregation, and Inventory Adjustment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(5), pages 1328-1353, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  10. Ray C. Fair, 1990. "The Production Smoothing Model is Alive and Well," NBER Working Papers 2877, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  11. Kenneth D. West, 1993. "Inventory Models," NBER Technical Working Papers 0143, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  12. Scott Schuh, 1996. "Evidence on the link between firm-level and aggregate inventory behavior," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 96-46, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
  13. John Shea, 1996. "Instrument Relevance in Multivariate Linear Models: A Simple Measure," NBER Technical Working Papers 0193, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  14. Steven N. Durlauf & Louis J. Maccini, 1993. "Measuring Noise in Inventory Models," NBER Working Papers 4487, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  15. George J. Hall & John Rust, 1999. "An Empirical Model of Inventory Investment by Durable Commodity Intermediaries," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1228, Cowles Foundation, Yale University. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  16. Antonio Matas-Mir & Denise R. Osborn & Marco Lombardi, 2005. "The Effect of Seasonal Adjustment on the Properties of Business Cycle Regimes," Econometrics Working Papers Archive wp2005_15, Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Statistica "G. Parenti". [Downloadable!]
  17. Darren Flood & Philip Lowe, 1993. "Inventories and the Business Cycle," RBA Research Discussion Papers rdp9306, Reserve Bank of Australia. [Downloadable!]
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