The paper looks at the role of inventories in U.S. business cycles and fluctuations. It concentrates upon the goods producing sector and constructs a model that features both input and output inventories. A range of shocks are present in the model, including sales, technology and inventory cost shocks. It is found that the presence of inventories does not change the average business cycle characteristics in the U.S. very much. The model is also used to examine whether new techniques for inventory control might have been an important contributing factor to the decline in the volatility of US GDP growth. It is found that these would have had little impact upon the level of volatility.
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Paper provided by National Centre for Econometric Research in its series NCER Working Paper Series with number
4.
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.:
Valerie A. Ramey & Kenneth D. West, 1997.
"Inventories,"
NBER Working Papers
6315, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Ramey, Valerie A. & West, Kenneth D., 1999.
"Inventories,"
Handbook of Macroeconomics,
in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 13, pages 863-923
Elsevier.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)