Quantitative Business Cycle Theory

本研究的目的是确定技术变革在影响战后国内和世界经济周期方面发挥了什么作用。先前的研究表明，如果这种技术冲击是波动的唯一来源，那么美国经济总量的可变性将只有所观察到的三分之二左右。这个项目将调查这些估计对尚未系统地考虑到的因素的敏感性。一个主要因素是国际贸易的作用，以及国内和国外冲击的相关性如何，以及各国之间的技术是否存在溢出效应等相关问题。另一个重要因素是人力资本积累。第三是耐用消费品的作用，它是总产出的重要组成部分，在实际商业周期模型中受到的关注相对较少。我们的策略是构建可计算的一般均衡模型，用于进行实验室实验，并进行测量，这对定量限制这些模型很重要，从而提高正在解决的问题的答案的可靠性。这项研究很重要，因为它将增加我们对技术变革如何影响商业周期的理解。

The purpose of this research is to determine what role technological change has played in affecting postwar domestic and world business cycles. Previous research has suggested that if such technological shocks were the only source of fluctuation, the variability of the aggregate U.S. economy would have been only about two-thirds as large as what has been observed. This project will investigate the sensitivity of those estimates to factors that have not yet been taken into account in a systematic way. A major factor is the role of international trade and the related question of how correlated domestic and foreign shocks are, and whether there are spill-over effects in technology across countries. Another important factor is human capital accumulation. A third is the role of consumer durables, an important component of aggregate output, which has received relatively little attention in real business cycle models. The strategy is both to construct computable general equilibrium models that can be used to perform laboratory experiments and to do measurements that are important for quantitatively restricting these models and, thus, improving the reliability of the answers to the questions being addressed. This research is important because it will increase our understanding of how technological change may influence the business cycle.