Noisy News in Business Cycles

No News in Business Cycles

This paper uses a structural, large dimensional factor model to evaluate the role of ‘news’ shocks (shocks with a delayed effect on productivity) in generating the business cycle. We find that (i) existing small-scale VECM models are affected by ‘non-fundamentalness’ and therefore fail to recover the correct shock and impulse response functions; (ii) news shocks have a limited role in explainin...

What’s News In Business Cycles

In the context of a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model, we perform classical maximum-likelihood and Bayesian estimations of the contribution of anticipated shocks to business cycles in the postwar United States. Our theoretical framework is a real-business-cycle model augmented with investment adjustment costs, variable capacity utilization, habit formation in consumption, and prefe...

News Shocks and Business Cycles

T he discussion surrounding the recent deep recession seems to have shifted the focus from currently used business cycle models to the standard Keynesian model (by which we mean the “old Keynesian,” as opposed to the new Keynesian, model). In the Keynesian model, pessimism among consumers and investors about the economy will simultaneously lower aggregate consumption and aggregate investment, a...

News and Business Cycles in Open Economies

New Evidence on News-Driven Business Cycles

We study the Beaudry and Portier (2006)-hypothesis of delayed-technology diffusion and news-driven business cycles. For German data on TFP and stock prices we find qualitatively similar empirical evidence. Quantitatively, however, an impulse response analysis suggests that a substantial part of the total TFP response is immediate rather than delayed. We relate this to disembodied technological ...