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Briefing
How Expectations About Future Productivity Drive Inventories
To what extent do expectations about future productivity developments drive business cycles? This Economic Brief reviews the state of the literature and discusses how new research by the authors establishes a novel method to answer. We specifically focus on firms' inventories, which stock goods available for future sales. We find that these inventories expand strongly to news about future productivity developments. This confirms that expectations about future productivity are a powerful force behind aggregate fluctuations, a finding with important implications for widely used economic models.
Working Paper
Is There News in Inventories?
This paper identifies total factor productivity (TFP) news shocks using standard VAR methodology and documents a new stylized fact: in response to news about future increases in TFP, inventories rise and comove positively with other major macroeconomic aggregates. The authors show that the standard theoretical model used to capture the effects of news shocks cannot replicate this fact when extended to include inventories. To explain the empirical inventory behavior, they develop a framework that relies on the presence of knowledge capital accumulated through a learning-by-doing process. The ...
Working Paper
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 ...