Research Details

Abstract

Are news shocks, which change agents' expectations about future fundamentals, an important source of business-cycle fluctuations? The existing literature has provided a wide range of answers, finding that news shocks can account for 10 percent to 60 percent of the volatility of output. We show that looking at the dynamics of inventories, so far neglected in this literature, cleanly isolates the role of news shocks in driving business cycles. In particular, inventory dynamics provide an upper bound on the explanatory power of news shocks. We show, for a broad class of theoretical models, that finished-good inventories must fall when there is an increase in consumption and investment induced by news shocks. When good news about future fundamentals lowers expected future marginal costs, firms delay current production and satisfy the increase in demand by selling from existing inventories. This result is robust across the nature of the news and the presence of different types of adjustment costs. We therefore propose a novel empirical identification strategy for news shocks: negative comovement between inventories and components of private spending. Estimating a structural VAR with sign restrictions on inventories, consumption and investment, our identified shock explains at most 20 percent of output variations. Intuitively, since inventories are procyclical in the data, shocks that generate negative comovement between inventories and sales cannot account for the bulk of business-cycle fluctuations.

Type

Article

Author(s)

Nicolas Crouzet, Hyunseung Oh

Date Published

2016

Citations

Crouzet, Nicolas, and Hyunseung Oh. 2016. What do inventories tell us about news-driven business cycles?. Journal of Monetary Economics.: 49-66.