IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/imf/imfwpa/2017-201.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

What Prevents a Real Business Cycle Model from Matching the U.S. Data? Decomposing the Labor Wedge

Author

Listed:
  • Dmitry Plotnikov

Abstract

I carry out a business cycle accounting exercise (Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan, 2007) on the U.S. data measured in wage units (Farmer (2010)) for the entire postwar period. In contrast to a conventional approach, this approach preserves common medium-term business cycle fluctuations in GDP, its components and the unemployment rate. Additionally, it facilitates decomposition of the labor wedge into the labor supply and the labor demand wedges. Using this business cycle accounting methodology, I find that in the transformed data, most movements in GDP are accounted for by the labor supply wedge. Therefore, I reverse a key finding of the real business cycle literature which asserts that 70% or more of economic fluctuations can be explained by TFP shocks. In other words, the real business cycle model fits the data badly because the assumption that households are on their labor supply equation is flawed. This failure is masked by data that has been filtered with a conventional approach that removes fluctuations at medium frequencies. My findings are consistent with the literature on incomplete labor markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Dmitry Plotnikov, 2017. "What Prevents a Real Business Cycle Model from Matching the U.S. Data? Decomposing the Labor Wedge," IMF Working Papers 2017/201, International Monetary Fund.
  • Handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2017/201
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=45211
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Fehrle & Johannes Huber, 2020. "Business cycle accounting for the German fiscal stimulus program during the Great Recession," Discussion Paper Series 339, Universitaet Augsburg, Institute for Economics.
    2. Oscar Iván Ávila-Montealegre & Anderson Grajales-Olarte & Juan J. Ospina-Tejeiro & Mario A. Ramos-Veloza, 2023. "Minimum Wage and Macroeconomic Adjustment: Insights from a Small Open, Emerging, Economy with Formal and Informal Labor," Borradores de Economia 1264, Banco de la Republica de Colombia.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2017/201. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Akshay Modi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imfffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.