Accomplishment-based Renewal of Market Structure and Cyclical Fluctuations in Output, Employment, Prices

这是一个基于成就的、关于宏观经济波动的微观经济来源的极具成效的研究计划的更新。在之前的拨款中，研究人员证明，生产率的波动是由产品需求和要素供应的变化引起的，而不是技术冲击。这一结果挑战了实际经济周期理论的一个关键假设，该理论是宏观经济学中的一个重要学派。这一结果刺激了研究人员和其他人关于需求驱动的商业周期的经验和理论工作。新的支持使研究人员能够继续这一研究议程。这位研究人员还开发了一种创新的、强大的测试，以检验竞争行业的假设。如果一个行业是有竞争力的，那么索洛生产率剩余(产出增长率与投入加权增长率之间的差值)应该不随产品需求和要素生产率的外生变化而变化。在之前的拨款下，研究人员能够拒绝美国许多行业的不变性主张。这个项目探索了在这些行业中盛行的平衡。初步研究表明，投入和产出的表现就像是技术的规模回报不断增加一样。未来的研究将考察产业组织中存在外部性的证据，或者更具体地说，当与其打交道的公司的活动水平较高时，该公司的效率是否会提高。研究人员开发了一种新的方法来测试是否存在日益增长的回报和厚重的市场外部性。具体地说，经济计量方法是用来检验主要综合经济变量中的自发噪声的。产出自发变动的存在，是回报不断增加、市场外部性较强的经济体的证据。这一研究对于我们理解宏观经济波动和产业组织具有重要意义。对收益递增经济的研究尤其重要，因为产业组织中的大多数实证和理论工作都假设竞争是规模收益不变的竞争。美国产业内部存在显著外部性的证据也表明，研发支出比之前认为的更重要。

This is an accomplishment-based renewal of an extremely productive research program on the microeconomic sources of macroeconomic volatility. Under the previous grant the investigator demonstrated that fluctuations in productivity are induced by changes in product demand and factor supplies, rather than technology shocks. This result challenges a key assumption of real business cycle theory, an important school of thought in macroeconomics. This result has stimulated empirical and theoretical work by the investigator and others on demand driven business cycles. Renewed support permits the investigator to pursue this research agenda. The investigator also developed an innovative and powerful test of the assumption of a competitive industry. If an industry is competitive, then the Solow productivity residual (the difference between the rate of growth of output and the weighted growths of inputs) should be invariant to exogenous shifts in product demand and factor productivity. Under the previous grant the investigator was able to reject the invariance proposition for a large number of U.S. industries. This project explores what kind of equilibrium prevails in these industries. Preliminary research suggests that inputs and outputs behave as if the technology had increasing returns of scale. Future research examines evidence of externalities in industrial organization or, more specifically, whether one firm's efficiency rises when the firms it deals with have higher levels of activity. The investigator develops a new methodology for testing for the presence of increasing returns and thick-market externalities. Specifically, econometric methods are developed for testing for spontaneous noise in major aggregate economic variables. The presence of spontaneous movements in output is evidence of economies with increasing returns and thick-market externalities. This research makes significant contributions to our understanding of macroeconomic fluctuations and industrial organization. The research on economies with increasing returns is especially important because most empirical and theoretical work in industrial organization assumes competition with constant-returns-to-scale. Evidence of significant externalities within U.S. industries would also suggest that R&D expenditures are more important than previously believed.