Anticipated Technology Shocks: A Re-Evaluation Using Cointegrated Technologies

Joel Wagner ()

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: Two approaches have been taken in the literature to evaluate the relative importance of news shocks as a source of business cycle volatility. The first is an empirical approach that performs a structural vector autoregression to assess the relative importance of news shocks, while the second is a structural-model-based approach. The first approach suggests that anticipated technology shocks are an important source of business cycle volatility; the second finds anticipated technology shocks are incapable of generating any business cycle volatility. This paper challenges the latter conclusion by presenting a structural news shock model adapted to reproduce the cointegrating relationship between total factor productivity and the relative price of investment. With cointegrated neutral and investment-specific technology, anticipated shocks to the common stochastic trend explain approximately 22%, 32%, 34% and 20% of the variance of output, investment, hours and consumption in the United States, respectively, reconciling the discrepancy between theory and data.

Keywords: Business fluctuations and cycles; Productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge and nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bca:bocawp:17-11

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