Inventory investment and output volatility

1 “ 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,...

The roles of comovement and inventory investment in the reduction of output volatility

The Roles of Comovement and Inventory Investment in the Reduction of Output Volatility

More than 80 percent of the decline in the variance of aggregate output since 1984 is accounted for by a decline in the covariance (and correlation) of output among industries that hold inventories. Using a HAVAR macro model (Fratantoni and Schuh 2003) with only two sectors, manufacturing and trade, we show that this decline in comovement – and thus much of the Great Moderation in aggregate and...

1 “ Inventory Investment and Output Volatility ” Owen Irvine Michigan State University and Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

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,...

Institutions, Volatility and Investment

Countries with strong executive constraints have lower growth volatility but similar average growth to those with weak constraints. This paper argues that this may explain a strong reduced-form correlation between executive constraints and in‡ows of foreign investment. It uses a a novel dataset of Dutch sectorlevel investments between 1983 and 2012 to explore this issue. It formulates an econom...