题目：Capacity Underutilization and Demand Driven Business Cycles

报告人：孙天成   博士   伦敦经济学院

主持人：宋华盛  教授  浙江大学经济学院

时间：2018年12月21日 星期五 14：00―15：30

地点：浙江大学玉泉校区经济学院418室  

Abstract:

I proposed a simple macro-economic model where firms hold excess capacity despite long run capacity underutilization. Firms invest in excess capacity to compete for customers. Demand naturally drives business cycles as a result of capacity underutilization. A single consumption demand shock, which is a preference shock to the marginal utility of consumption of households, is able to generate the observed business cycle co-movements between consumption, investment, and hours, without generating a countercyclical real wage or an acyclical Solow residual. A calibrated model can explain up to 71% of the variance in the annual growth rate of output, 55% of the variance in the annual growth rate of hours, 50% of the variance in the annual growth rate of investment, and 48% of the variance in the annual change of capacity utilization rate with only two types of demand shocks, the consumption demand shock and an exogenous expenditure shock, which is a shock to government expenditure and net export. The model demonstrates that demand can be the main driving force of business cycles when capacity is not fully utilized.

CRPE秘书处

2018-12-18