IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/4455.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Diffusion Lags and Aggregate Fluctuations. New Name: Product Innovation and the Business Cycle

Author

Listed:
  • Boyan Jovanovic
  • Saul Lach

Abstract

This paper studies how random product innovations affect the time series properties of aggregates. It posits that recurring inventions of new intermediate goods differ in quality, and that their usage spreads gradually through the economy. It examines how fluctuations in per capita GNP are affected by these features of the innovation process. Micro data from the U.S. show, first, that the dispersion of products' qualities is quite large: Its coefficient of variation is 0.56. More importantly, they also show that the rate of diffusion of new products is relatively slow; Only 4.3% of the potential market size is realized in every year. Because diffusion is so slow, the model explains only low frequency movements in per capita GNP in the G-7 countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Boyan Jovanovic & Saul Lach, 1993. "Diffusion Lags and Aggregate Fluctuations. New Name: Product Innovation and the Business Cycle," NBER Working Papers 4455, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:4455
    Note: EFG PR
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w4455.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Prescott, Edward C., 1986. "Theory ahead of business-cycle measurement," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 11-44, January.
    2. Gort, Michael & Klepper, Steven, 1982. "Time Paths in the Diffusion of Product Innovations," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 92(367), pages 630-653, September.
    3. Michael B. Devereux & Allen C. Head & Beverly J. Lapham, 1993. "Exit and Entry, Increasing Returns to Specialization, and Business Cycles," Working Paper 871, Economics Department, Queen's University.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Julio J. Rotemberg & Michael Woodford, 1994. "Is the Business Cycles a Necessary Consequence of Stochastic Growth?," NBER Working Papers 4650, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Cooley, Thomas F. & Dwyer, Mark, 1998. "Business cycle analysis without much theory A look at structural VARs," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 83(1-2), pages 57-88.
    3. George Korres & Emmanuel Marmaras & George Tsobanoglou, 2004. "Enterpreneurship and innovation activites in the schumpeterian lines," ERSA conference papers ersa04p169, European Regional Science Association.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jovanovic, Boyan & Lach, Saul, 1990. "The Diffusion Of Technology And Inequality Among Nations," Working Papers 90-34, C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, New York University.
    2. Oscar Gutiérrez & Francisco Ruiz-Aliseda, 2011. "Real options with unknown-date events," Annals of Finance, Springer, vol. 7(2), pages 171-198, May.
    3. Adnan Haider Bukhari & Safdar Ullah Khan, 2008. "A Small Open Economy DSGE Model for Pakistan," The Pakistan Development Review, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, vol. 47(4), pages 963-1008.
    4. David Andolfatto & Paul Gomme, 2003. "Monetary Policy Regimes and Beliefs," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 44(1), pages 1-30, February.
    5. Ireland, Peter N., 2003. "Endogenous money or sticky prices?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(8), pages 1623-1648, November.
    6. Kevin E. Beaubrun-Diant & Julien Matheron, 2008. "Rentabilités d'actifs et fluctuations économiques : une perspective d'équilibre général dynamique et stochastique," Economie & Prévision, La Documentation Française, vol. 0(2), pages 35-63.
    7. Marvin Goodfriend, 2004. "Monetary policy in the new neoclassical synthesis : a primer," Economic Quarterly, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, vol. 90(Sum), pages 21-45.
    8. Andrés Felipe Martínez, 2006. "Determinantes de la supervivencia de empresas industriales en el área metropolitana de Cali 1994-2003," Ensayos Sobre Economía Regional (ESER) 2320, Banco de la República - Economía Regional.
    9. Diego Comin & Ramana Nanda, 2019. "Financial Development and Technology Diffusion," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 67(2), pages 395-419, June.
    10. Jean-Pierre Danthine & John B. Donaldson, 2001. "Macroeconomic Frictions: What Have We Learned from the Real Business Cycle Research Programme?," International Economic Association Series, in: Jacques Drèze (ed.), Advances in Macroeconomic Theory, chapter 4, pages 56-75, Palgrave Macmillan.
    11. van Roye, Björn & Wesselbaum, Dennis, 2009. "Capital, endogenous separations, and the business cycle," Kiel Working Papers 1561, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    12. Ghosal, Vivek, 2007. "Small is Beautiful but Size Matters: The Asymmetric Impact of Uncertainty and Sunk Costs on Small and Large Businesses," MPRA Paper 5461, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. N. Gregory Mankiw & Ricardo Reis, 2002. "Sticky Information versus Sticky Prices: A Proposal to Replace the New Keynesian Phillips Curve," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 117(4), pages 1295-1328.
    14. Jackie Krafft, 2006. "Business history and the organization of industry," Post-Print hal-00211780, HAL.
    15. J. Subrick & Andrew Young, 2010. "Nobelity and novelty: Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott’s contributions viewed from Vienna," The Review of Austrian Economics, Springer;Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, vol. 23(1), pages 35-53, March.
    16. Johnson, Joanne & Baldwin, John R., 1998. "Differences in Strategies and Performances of Different Types of Innovators," Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series 1997102e, Statistics Canada, Analytical Studies Branch.
    17. Veaceslav Grigoras & Irina Eusignia Stanciu, 2016. "New evidence on the (de)synchronisation of business cycles: Reshaping the European business cycle," International Economics, CEPII research center, issue 147, pages 27-52.
    18. Lars Lochstoer & Harjoat S. Bhamra, 2009. "Return Predictability and Labor Market Frictions in a Real Business Cycle Model," 2009 Meeting Papers 1257, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    19. Rajshree Agarwal & Barry L. Bayus, 2002. "The Market Evolution and Sales Takeoff of Product Innovations," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 48(8), pages 1024-1041, August.
    20. Jordi Galí & Mark Gertler, 2007. "Macroeconomic Modeling for Monetary Policy Evaluation," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 21(4), pages 25-46, Fall.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E3 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:nbr:nberwo:4455. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.