Quantitative Business Cycle Analytics

对宏观经济学来说，没有什么比试图理解商业周期更重要的了。近年来，在所有宏观经济研究中，有很大一部分致力于探索模型的影响，在这些模型中，所有家庭和企业都理性地形成对未来的预期，并在追求明确目标的过程中采取行动，并将这些影响与观察到的有关商业周期的事实进行比较。这个项目的贡献来自于开发和分析研究商业周期模型，这些模型在质量和数量上与观察到的关于商业周期的事实更加一致。更具体地说，该项目在爱德华·普雷斯科特教授的真实商业周期模型的基础上，对一套核心的商业周期模型进行了分析扩展和求解。在这个模型中加入了以下因素：扭曲的税收、多个生产部门、政府支出构成的变化、多个劳动类型、公用事业中的时间不可分离性、以及价格调整迟缓。这些元素捕捉到了其他商业周期模型中缺失的经济现实的重要方面。

Nothing is more central to macroeconomics than the attempt to understand business cycles. A large fraction of all macroeconomic research in recent years has been devoted to exploring the implications of models in which all households and firms form expectations about the future rationally and act in the pursuit of well-defined objectives, and comparing these implications to observed facts about business cycles. The contribution of this project comes from developing and studying analytically business cycle models that are more consistent qualitatively and quantitatively with observed facts about business cycles. More specifically, the project extends and solves analytically a central set of business cycle models based on Professor Edward Prescott's Real Business Cycle Model. The following elements are added to this model: distortionary taxation, more than one production sector, changes in the composition of government spending, more than one type of labor, time-nonseparabilities in the utility, and sluggish price adjustment. These elements capture important aspects of economic reality missing in other models of business cycles.