Infrequent Microeconomic Adjustment and Macroeconomic Fluctuations: Theory and Evidence

对微观经济交易成本进行建模，对于更好地理解大多数宏观经济变量随着时间的变化，如耐用消费品、商业投资、库存、就业和价格，是必不可少的。为了获得对这些变量的时间序列性质的真正结构性解释，必须仔细处理潜在的微观经济问题和汇总过程。在现实交易成本存在的情况下，现有的动态调整微观经济模型预测，个体单位不应该对其环境中的每一项创新都做出反应，而且它们可能对那些触发由模型确定的变量调整的创新做出不连续的反应。本研究的目的是扩展现有的不频繁微观经济调整模型，分析其对总体现象的影响，并检验这些影响并评估其数量相关性。这项研究很重要，因为它将更好地理解微观层面的交易成本在多大程度上可能为解释商业周期提供一个合理的微观经济基础。

Modeling microeconomic transaction costs is essential for a better understanding of the behavior of most macroeconomic variables over time like consumer durables, business investment, inventories, employment, and prices. In order to obtain a genuinely structural interpretation of the time series properties of these variables, a careful treatment both of the underlying microeconomic problem and of the aggregation process is necessary. Available microeconomic models of dynamic adjustment in the presence of realistic transaction costs predict that individual units should not react to every innovation in their environment, and that they may react discontinuously to those innovations that trigger adjustment of variables determined by the model. The purpose of this research is to extend available models of infrequent microeconomic adjustment, to analyze their implications for aggregate phenomena, and to test these implications and assess their quantitative relevance. This research is important because it will provide a better understanding of the degree to which transaction costs at the micro level might provide a plausible microeconomic foundation for explaining the business cycle.