This time is different Reinhart, Carmen M; Rogoff, Kenneth S
2009., 2009, 2009-09-11, 20090101, c2009
eBook
Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have ...chimed, "this time is different"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. With this breakthrough study, leading economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff definitively prove them wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or how little--we have learned.
This paper studies an agent-based model that bridges Keynesian theories of demand-generation and Schumpeterian theories of technology-fueled economic growth. We employ the model to investigate the ...properties of macroeconomic dynamics and the impact of public polices on supply, demand and the “fundamentals” of the economy. We find profound complementarities between factors influencing aggregate demand and drivers of technological change that affect both “short-run” fluctuations and long-term growth patterns. From a normative point of view, simulations show a corresponding complementarity between “Keynesian” and “Schumpeterian” policies in sustaining long-run growth paths characterized by milder fluctuations and relatively lower unemployment levels. The matching or mismatching between innovative exploration of new technologies and the conditions of demand generation appear to suggest the presence of two distinct “regimes” of growth (or absence thereof) characterized by different short-run fluctuations and unemployment levels.
Many historical processes exhibit recurrent patterns of change. Century-long periods of population expansion come before long periods of stagnation and decline; the dynamics of prices mirror ...population oscillations; and states go through strong expansionist phases followed by periods of state failure, endemic sociopolitical instability, and territorial loss. Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov explore the dynamics and causal connections between such demographic, economic, and political variables in agrarian societies and offer detailed explanations for these long-term oscillations--what the authors call secular cycles.
We provide a nonlinear characterization of the macroeconomic impact of microeconomic productivity shocks in terms of reduced-form nonparametric elasticities for efficient economies. We also show how ...microeconomic parameters are mapped to these reduced-form general equilibrium elasticities. In this sense, we extend the foundational theorem of Hulten (1978) beyond the first order to capture nonlinearities. Key features ignored by first-order approximations that play a crucial role are: structural microeconomic elasticities of substitution, network linkages, structural microeconomic returns to scale, and the extent of factor reallocation. In a business-cycle calibration with sectoral shocks, nonlinearities magnify negative shocks and attenuate positive shocks, resulting in an aggregate output distribution that is asymmetric (negative skewness), fattailed (excess kurtosis), and has a negative mean, even when shocks are symmetric and thin-tailed. Average output losses due to short-run sectoral shocks are an order of magnitude larger than the welfare cost of business cycles calculated by Lucas (1987). Nonlinearities can also cause shocks to critical sectors to have disproportionate macroeconomic effects, almost tripling the estimated impact of the 1970s oil shocks on world aggregate output. Finally, in a long-run growth context, nonlinearities, which underpin Baumol's cost disease via the increase over time in the sales shares of low-growth bottleneck sectors, account for a 20 percentage point reduction in aggregate TFP growth over the period 1948-2014 in the United States.
We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model of exchange rate determination that accounts for all major exchange rate puzzles, including Meese-Rogoff, Backus-Smith, purchasing power parity, and ...uncovered interest rate parity puzzles. We build on a standard international real business cycle model with home bias in consumption, augmented with shocks in the financial market that result in a volatile near-martingale behavior of exchange rates and ensure their empirically relevant comovement with macroeconomic variables, both nominal and real. Combining financial shocks with conventional productivity and monetary shocks allows the model to reproduce the exchange rate disconnect properties without compromising the fit of the business cycle moments.
► We propose a metric to measure and test for business cycles synchronization. ► France and Germany are the most synchronized countries with the rest of Europe. ► Portugal, Greece, Ireland and ...Finland are not synchronized with the rest of Europe. ► The French leads the German business cycle as well as the rest of Europe. ► The Czech Republic seems a promising candidate to join the Euro in the future.
We use wavelet analysis to study business cycle synchronization across the EU-15 and the Euro-12 countries. Based on the wavelet transform, we propose a metric to measure and test for business cycles synchronization. Several conclusions emerge. France and Germany form the core of the Euro land, being the most synchronized countries with the rest of Europe. Portugal, Greece, Ireland and Finland do not show statistically relevant degrees of synchronization with Europe. We also show that some countries (like Spain) have a French accent, while others have a German accent (e.g., Austria). Perhaps surprisingly, we find that the French business cycle has been leading the German business cycle as well as the rest of Europe. Among the countries that may, in the future, join the Euro, the Czech Republic seems the most promising candidate.
Finance and Business Cycles Mian, Atif; Sufi, Amir
The Journal of economic perspectives,
07/2018, Letnik:
32, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
What is the role of the financial sector in explaining business cycles? This question is as old as the field of macroeconomics, and an extensive body of research conducted since the Global Financial ...Crisis of 2008 has offered new answers. The specific idea put forward in this article is that expansions in credit supply, operating primarily through household demand, have been an important driver of business cycles. We call this the credit-driven household demand channel. While this channel helps explain the recent global recession, it also describes economic cycles in many countries over the past 40 years.
We present a flexible and scalable method for computing global solutions of high-dimensional stochastic dynamic models. Within a time iteration or value function iteration setup, we interpolate ...functions using an adaptive sparse grid algorithm. With increasing dimensions, sparse grids grow much more slowly than standard tensor product grids. Moreover, adaptivity adds a second layer of sparsity, as grid points are added only where they are most needed, for instance, in regions with steep gradients or at non-differentiabilities. To further speed up the solution process, our implementation is fully hybrid parallel, combining distributed and shared memory parallelization paradigms, and thus permits an efficient use of high-performance computing architectures. To demonstrate the broad applicability of our method, we solve two very different types of dynamic models: first, high-dimensional international real business cycle models with capital adjustment costs and irreversible investment; second, multiproduct menu-cost models with temporary sales and economies of scope in price setting.
This paper incorporates sloping marginal cost curves and their variations across industries into an open macro model, motivated by the fact that industries’ output, imports, and exports are more ...procyclical when their economies of scale arise from sloping marginal cost curves rather than fixed costs. The model, consistent with the data, delivers endogenous within-firm interdependence across markets and export gains/losses, which reproduce observed industrial business cycle patterns as well as more correlated aggregate business cycles across countries. The findings highlight the importance of marginal cost structures in international business cycle research.
•In US manufacturing industries, heterogeneous economies of scale mainly arise from non-constant marginal costs rather than fixed costs.•Output, exports, and imports are more procyclical in industries with decreasing marginal costs.•An open macro model with different slopes of the marginal cost curves well reproduces the industrial and aggregate international business cycle patterns.
We investigate the relationship between national culture and international business cycle co-movements. We first characterize international business cycle co-movements with a dynamic latent factor ...model that decomposes 101 countries' real GDP growth rates into world, regional and country-specific factors and estimate the proportion of real GDP growth rate variance explained by the world, regional and country factors for each country. We then regress these proportions on each of the five dimensions of Hofstede's national culture with a set of control variables. We find that four dimensions (except for power distance) are significantly related to business cycle co-movements, and they have different impacts. In countries with masculinity, uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation preferences, the global factor explains a larger real GDP growth rate variance. Individualism weakens a country's business cycle co-movement with the global business cycle. Countries with similar cultural values have similar economic structures and similar exposures to global shocks, which lead to business cycle co-movements. Our results are robust after addressing the issue of endogeneity and subsample analyses.
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