While news shocks are believed to be instrumental in explaining business cycles, many existing models fail to predict an economic boom in consumption, investment, employment, output and the stock market in response to good news about future productivity. This paper proposes and evaluates a model with the intrinsic desire for wealth accumulation, or ‘the spirit of capitalism’ hypothesis, which generates the aforementioned responses. Restrictions for the existence of expectation driven business cycles are derived analytically. The restrictions are confirmed by an estimated version of the model. The proposed preference specification is supported with additional empirical evidence.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University of Ottawa, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
0804E.
Find related papers by JEL classification: E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports: