Search Results
Working Paper
A study of automobile inventory investment
Working Paper
Inventory investment and output volatility
This paper reports the results of a detailed examination of the hypothesis that improved inventory management and production techniques are responsible for the decline in the volatility of U.S. GDP growth. Our innovations are to look at the data at a finer level of disaggregation than previous studies, to exploit cross-sectional heterogeneity to obtain clearer identification of this hypothesis, and to provide a complete accounting of the change in GDP volatility. Changes in inventory behavior can account directly for only up to half of the total reduction in GDP volatility. Cross-section ...
Working Paper
Interest sensitivity and volatility reductions: cross-section evidence
As has been widely observed, the volatility of GDP has declined since the mid-1980s compared with prior years. One leading explanation for this decline is that monetary policy improved significantly in the later period. We utilize a cross-section of 2-digit manufacturing and trade industries to further investigate this explanation. Since a major channel through which monetary policy operates is variation in the federal funds rate, we hypothesized that industries that are more interest sensitive should have experienced larger declines in the variance of their outputs in the post-1983 period. ...
Working Paper
The roles of comovement and inventory investment in the reduction of output volatility
Most of the reduction in GDP volatility since the 1983 is accounted for by a decline in comovement of output among industries that hold inventories. This decline is not simply a passive byproduct of reduced volatility in common factors or shocks. Instead, structural changes occurred in the long-run and dynamic relationships among industries? sales and inventory investment behavior?especially in the automobile and related industries, which are linked by supply and distribution chains featuring new production and inventory management techniques. Using a HAVAR model (Fratantoni and Schuh 2003) ...