The Role of Investment Wedges in the Carlstrom-Fuerst Economy and Business Cycle Accounting

Abstract

Many researches that apply business cycle accounting (hereafter, BCA) to actual data conclude that models with investment frictions or investment wedges are not promising for modeling business cycle dynamics. In this paper, we apply BCA to artificial data generated by a variant model of Carlstrom and Fuerst (1997, American Economic Review), which is one of representative models with investment frictions. We find that BCA leads us to conclude that models of investment wedges are not promising according to the criteria of BCA, although the true model contains investment frictions