News and Financial Intermediation in Aggregate Fluctuations

We develop a two-sector DSGE model with financial intermediation to investigate the role of news as a driving force of the business cycle. We find that news about future capital quality is a significant source of aggregate fluctuations, accounting for around 37% in output variation in cyclical frequencies. Financial intermediation is essential for the importance and propagation of capital quality shocks. In addition, news shocks in capital quality generate aggregate and sectoral comovement as in the data and is consistent with procyclical movements in the value of capital. From a historical perspective, news shocks to capital quality are to a large extent responsible for the recession following the 1990s investment boom and the latest recession following the financial crisis, but played a much smaller role during the recession at the beginning of the 1990s. This is in line with the belief that revisions of overoptimistic expectations contributed to the last two recessions while movements in fundamentals played a much bigger role for the recession at the beginning of the 1990s

Learning, Capital-Embodied Technology and Aggregate Fluctuations

Recent evidence suggests that agents’ expectations may have played a role in several cycli¬cal episodes such as the U.S. "new economy" boom in the late 1990s, the real estate boom in Japan in the 1980s and the real estate boom in the U.S. which ended in 2008. One chal¬lenge in the expectations driven view of fluctuations has been to develop simple one sector models that can give rise to such fluctuations without a compromise on other dimensions. In this paper we propose a simple generalization of the Greenwood et al. (1988) one sec¬tor model and show it can generate fluctuations that arise as a result of agents difficulty to forecast productivity embodied in new capital. The two key assumptions in the model are: (1) the vintage view of capital productivity, whereby each successive vintage has (po¬tentially) different productivity and (2) agents’ imperfect information and learning about this productivity. The model is consistent with second and third moments from U.S. data. Simulations of the model suggest that, (a) noise amplifies fluctuations and (b) pure noise can trigger recessions that mimic in magnitude, duration and depth the typical post WW II U.S. recession.News shocks, expectations, growth asymmetry, Bayesian learning, business cy¬cles.

Solving models with jump discontinuities in policy functions

We show that the Value Function Iteration (VFI) algorithm has difficulties approximating models with jump discontinuities in policy functions. We find that VFI fails to accurately identify both the location and size of jump discontinuities while the Endogenous Grid Method (EGM) and the Finite Element Method (FEM) are much better at approximating this class of models. We further show that combining value function iteration with a local interpolation step (VFI-INT) is sufficient to obtain accurate approximations. Differences between policy functions generated by VFI and these alternative methods are economically significant. We highlight that these differences across methods cannot be identified using Euler equation errors as these are not a sufficient measure of accuracy for models with jump discontinuities in policy functions. As a result, speed comparisons across methods that rely on Euler equation errors as a measure for accuracy can be misleading. The combination of computational speed, relatively easy implementation and adaptability make VFI-INT especially suitable for approximating models with jump discontinuities in policy functions

Sectoral TFP news shocks

We document a strong similarity in the macroeconomic effects of consumption-specific and investment specific TFP news shocks. This co-linearity suggests a diffusion channel of technological innovations from the investment to the consumption sector that forecast future changes in aggregate TFP. This finding connects two views of the literature on news shocks: aggregate TFP news and investment specific news

News and Financial Intermediation in Aggregate Fluctuations

We develop a two-sector DSGE model with financial intermediation to investigate the role of news as a driving force of the business cycle. We find that news about future capital quality is a significant source of aggregate fluctuations, accounting for around 37% in output variation in cyclical frequencies. Financial intermediation is essential for the importance and propagation of capital quality shocks. In addition, news shocks in capital quality generate aggregate and sectoral comovement as in the data and is consistent with procyclical movements in the value of capital. From a historical perspective, news shocks to capital quality are to a large extent responsible for the recession following the 1990s investment boom and the latest recession following the financial crisis, but played a much smaller role during the recession at the beginning of the 1990s. This is in line with the belief that revisions of overoptimistic expectations contributed to the last two recessions while movements in fundamentals played a much bigger role for the recession at the beginning of the 1990s

What Drives Inventory Accumulation? : News on Rates of Return and Marginal Costs

We study the effects of news shocks on inventory accumulation in a structural VAR framework. We establish that inventories react strongly and positively to news about future increases in total factor productivity. Theory suggests that the transmission channel of news shocks to inventories works through movements in marginal costs, through movements in sales, or through interest rates. We provide evidence that changes in external and internal rates of return are central to the transmission for such news shocks. We do not find evidence of a strong substitution effect that shifts production from the present into the future

Taking Stock of TFP News Shocks : The Inventory Comovement Puzzle

Inventories are an important, highly volatile and forward looking component of the business cycle, yet they have been largely neglected by the literature on TFP news shocks that argues such shocks are important drivers of macroeconomic fluctuations. We use a standard VAR identification to document a new fact: in response to TFP news, inventories move procyclically along with the other major macroeconomic aggregates. Our finding is not self-evident: conventional views would suggest news about higher future productivity provides incentives to run the current inventory stock down and increase stockholding in the future when productivity is high. We provide evidence that this substitution effect is dominated by a demand effect due to which firms increase inventories in response to sales in light of rising consumption and investment. Our empirical fact corroborates the view that TFP news shocks are important drivers of macroeconomic fluctuations. However, it imposes a challenge to existing theoretical frameworks as they fail to reproduce the procyclical inventory movements in response to TFP news shocks. We suggest this comovement puzzle can be solved through extending a standard framework with intangible capital and wage stickiness

Firms’ financing dynamics around lumpy capacity adjustments

We study how firms adjust their financial positions around the times when they undertake lumpy adjustments in capital or employment. Using U.S. firm level data, we document systematic patterns of cash and debt financing around lumpy adjustment, remarkably similar across capital and employment. Firm-specific fundamentals reflected in Tobin’s Q, profitability and productivity are leading indicators of lumpy adjustment. Cash and debt capacity are actively manipulated, and contribute significantly quantitatively, to increase financial resources in anticipation of the expansion of firm capacity. Lumpy contractions in productive capacity follow years where firms reduce cash balances and hold above average levels of debt. During and after contractions, firms rebuild cash and reduce debt growth significantly in a concerted effort to restore financial resources by adjusting their productive operations

The effect of monetary policy shocks in the United Kingdom: an external instruments approach

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