Business Cycles in the Contemporary World: Description, Causes, Aggregation, and Synchronization

ISBN-13: 9783790815320 / Angielski / Miękka / 2002 / 165 str.

Bernd Sussmuth; B. Sussmuth; Bernd S]ssmuth

Opis

The book provides a thorough and sophisticated descriptive analysis of business cycles in a historical perspective. The study is based on the latest available time series as well as latest techniques from the frequency domain. A combined univariate and bivariate analysis is conducted on the national as well as supranational (G7- and Euro-Area wide) level. Issues of stability, volatility, and cyclicality are investigated jointly. An extensive analysis of US manufacturing investment series on the fairly disaggregated four-digit level highlights the limits of linear models to capture the sectoral aggregation process. Synchronization is modelled by a mode-locking mechanism of industrial investment cycles induced by informational externalities. The model in its stochastic version is numerically simulated to assess an agreement between model and data.

Spis treści

1. Introduction.- 1.1 Business Cycle Research: 21st Century Perspective.- 1.1.1 The Classic View.- 1.1.2 From CBC to RBC School.- 1.2 Recent Empirical Findings in Favor of CBC.- 1.1.1 Aggregate Investment Fluctuations and Business Cycles.- 1.1.2 The Cyclicality of the Aggregate Investment Series.- 1.1.3 Investment, the RBC View and Disaggregated Dynamics.- I.Methodology.- 2. General Considerations and Historiography.- 2.1 Methodologies: Econometrics vs. Natural Sciences.- 2.2 The Econometric Approach to Time Series Analysis.- 3. The Analysis of Cyclical Dynamics.- 3.1 The Detrending Problem.- 3.2 Volatility and Spectral Analysis.- 3.2.1 Contribution-to-Variance Analysis.- 3.2.2 Spectral Analysis: The Univariate Case.- 3.2.3 The Analysis of Complex Roots.- 3.2.4 Spectral Analysis: The Multivariate Case.- II. National, Supra- and International Cycles.- 4. The G7 and Eurol5 Economies: 1960 - 2000.- 4.1 Data and Strategy.- 4.2 National Uni- and Bivariate Stylized Facts.- 4.2.1 General Salient Facts.- 4.2.2 Robust Univariate Stylized Facts: National Cycles.- 4.2.3 Robust Bivariate Stylized Facts: National Cycles.- 4.3 Supranational Bivariate Stylized Facts.- 5. Mode-Locking and the Global Cycle.- 5.1 Introduction and Motivation of the Discussion.- 5.2 Generalizing Economic Cycles’ Mode-Lock Modelling.- 5.3 A Model Incorporating Information Externalities.- 5.1.1 The Model without Information Externalities.- 5.1.2 Introducing Information Externalities.- 5.1.3 Calibration of the Model and Some Simulations.- 5.4 Outlook and Concluding Remark.- III. The Sectoral Constitution of Macro-Cycles.- 6. An Aggregation Problem for Linear Models?.- 6.1 Description of US Business Cycles.- 6.1.1 Business Cycles in Central US NIPA Time Series.- 6.1.2 Cycles in Disaggregated US Manufacturing Investment.- 6.2 Testing Autoregressivity and Aggregate Feedback.- 6.3 Linear Models of the Aggregation Process.- 6.4 Evaluation of Linear Models.- 7. The Synchronization of Sectoral Cycles.- 7.1 Definitions of Synchronization.- 7.2 A Recent Approach: Method and Findings.- 7.3 The “Shift-Win“-Approach: Method and Findings.- 8. A Non-Linear Synchronization Model.- 8.1 Theoretical Underpinning of the Model.- 8.1.1 The Medium-Term Investment Objective: Smoothing.- 8.1.2 The Short-Term Investment Objective: Herding.- 8.1.3 The Integrated Model: Smoothing and Herding.- 8.1.4 The Synchronization Mechanism.- 8.2 A Thorough Simulation Study.- 8.2.1 Calibration as an Alternative to Estimation.- 8.2.2 Setting Up the Simulation Strategy and Determining Priors.- 8.2.3. Monte Carlo Simulations of the Model Incorporating Shocks.- 8.2.4 Evaluation of the Model and Outlook.- 9. Conclusion.- Abbreviations.- References.