Real business-cycle theory

Real business-cycle theory (RBC theory) is a class of new classical macroeconomics models in which
business-cycle fluctuations are accounted for by real (in contrast to nominal) shocks.[1] Unlike other leading
theories of the business cycle, RBC theory sees business cycle fluctuations as the efficient response to
exogenous changes in the real economic environment. That is, the level of national output necessarily
maximizes expected utility, and governments should therefore concentrate on long-run structural policy
changes and not intervene through discretionary fiscal or monetary policy designed to actively smooth out
economic short-term fluctuations.

According to RBC theory, business cycles are therefore "real" in that they do not represent a failure of
markets to clear but rather reflect the most efficient possible operation of the economy, given the structure of
the economy.

RBC theory is associated with freshwater economics (the Chicago School of Economics in the neoclassical
tradition).

Business cycles
If we were to take snapshots of an economy at different points in time, no two photos would look alike.
This occurs for two reasons:

1. Many advanced economies exhibit sustained growth over time. That is, snapshots taken
many years apart will most likely depict higher levels of economic activity in the later period.
2. There exist seemingly random fluctuations around this growth trend. Thus given two
snapshots in time, predicting the latter with the earlier is nearly impossible.
A common way to observe such behavior is by looking
at a time series of an economy's output, more
specifically gross national product (GNP). This is just
the value of the goods and services produced by a
country's businesses and workers.

Figure 1 shows the time series of real GNP for the

United States from 1954–2005. While we see
continuous growth of output, it is not a steady increase.
There are times of faster growth and times of slower
growth. Figure 2 transforms these levels into growth
rates of real GNP and extracts a smoother growth
trend. A common method to obtain this trend is the FIGURE 1
Hodrick–Prescott filter. The basic idea is to find a
balance between the extent to which general growth
trend follows the cyclical movement (since long term growth rate is not likely to be perfectly constant) and
how smooth it is. The HP filter identifies the longer term fluctuations as part of the growth trend while
classifying the more jumpy fluctuations as part of the cyclical component.
Observe the difference between this growth
component and the jerkier data. Economists refer to
these cyclical movements about the trend as business
cycles. Figure 3 explicitly captures such deviations.
Note the horizontal axis at 0. A point on this line
indicates at that year, there is no deviation from the
trend. All other points above and below the line imply
deviations. By using log real GNP the distance
between any point and the 0 line roughly equals the
percentage deviation from the long run growth trend.
Also note that the Y-axis uses very small values. This
indicates that the deviations in real GNP are very small
comparatively, and might be attributable to FIGURE 2
measurement errors rather than real deviations.

We call large positive deviations (those above the 0

axis) peaks. We call relatively large negative deviations
(those below the 0 axis) troughs. A series of positive
deviations leading to peaks are booms and a series of
negative deviations leading to troughs are recessions.

At a glance, the deviations just look like a string of

waves bunched together—nothing about it appears
consistent. To explain causes of such fluctuations may
appear rather difficult given these irregularities.
However, if we consider other macroeconomic
variables, we will observe patterns in these
irregularities. For example, consider Figure 4 which FIGURE 3
depicts fluctuations in output and consumption
spending, i.e. what people buy and use at any given
period. Observe how the peaks and troughs align at almost the same places and how the upturns and
downturns coincide.

We might predict that other similar data may exhibit

similar qualities. For example, (a) labor, hours worked
(b) productivity, how effective firms use such capital or
labor, (c) investment, amount of capital saved to help
future endeavors, and (d) capital stock, value of
machines, buildings and other equipment that help
firms produce their goods. While Figure 5 shows a
similar story for investment, the relationship with

FIGURE 4
capital in Figure 6 departs from the story. We need a way to pin down a better story; one way is to look at
some statistics.

Stylized facts
By eyeballing the data, we can infer several
regularities, sometimes called stylized facts. One is
persistence. For example, if we take any point in the
series above the trend (the x-axis in figure 3), the
probability the next period is still above the trend is
very high. However, this persistence wears out over
time. That is, economic activity in the short run is quite
predictable but due to the irregular long-term nature of
fluctuations, forecasting in the long run is much more
difficult if not impossible. FIGURE 5

Another regularity is cyclical variability. Column A of

Table 1 lists a measure of this with standard deviations.
The magnitude of fluctuations in output and hours
worked are nearly equal. Consumption and
productivity are similarly much smoother than output
while investment fluctuates much more than output.
The capital stock is the least volatile of the indicators.

Yet another regularity is the co-movement between

output and the other macroeconomic variables. Figures
4 – 6 illustrated such relationship. We can measure this
in more detail using correlations as listed in column B
of Table 1. A procyclical variable has a positive
correlation since it usually increases during booms and FIGURE 6

decreases during recessions. Vice versa, a

countercyclical variable has a negative correlation. An
acyclical variable, with correlation close to zero, implies no
systematic relationship to the business cycle. We find that
productivity is slightly procyclical. This implies workers and
capital are more productive when the economy is experiencing
a boom. They are not quite as productive when the economy is
experiencing a slowdown. Similar explanations follow for
consumption and investment, which are strongly procyclical.
Labor is also procyclical while capital stock appears acyclical.

Observing these similarities yet seemingly non-deterministic

fluctuations about trend, the question arises as to why any of
TABLE 1
this occurs. Since people prefer economic booms over
recessions, it follows that if all people in the economy make
optimal decisions, these fluctuations are caused by something outside the decision-making process. So the
key question really is: what main factor influences and subsequently changes the decisions of all factors in
an economy?

Economists have come up with many ideas to answer the above question. The one which currently
dominates the academic literature on real business cycle theory was introduced by Finn E. Kydland and
Edward C. Prescott in their 1982 work Time to Build And Aggregate Fluctuations. They envisioned this
factor to be technological shocks—i.e., random fluctuations in the productivity level that shifted the constant
growth trend up or down. Examples of such shocks include innovations, bad weather, imported oil price
increase, stricter environmental and safety regulations, etc. The general gist is that something occurs that
directly changes the effectiveness of capital and/or labour. This in turn affects the decisions of workers and
firms, who in turn change what they buy and produce and thus eventually affect output. RBC models
predict time sequences of allocation for consumption, investment, etc. given these shocks.

But exactly how do these productivity shocks cause ups and downs in economic activity? Consider a
positive but temporary shock to productivity. This momentarily increases the effectiveness of workers and
capital, allowing a given level of capital and labor to produce more output.

Individuals face two types of tradeoffs. One is the consumption-investment decision. Since productivity is
higher, people have more output to consume. An individual might choose to consume all of it today. But if
he values future consumption, all that extra output might not be worth consuming in its entirety today.
Instead, he may consume some but invest the rest in capital to enhance production in subsequent periods
and thus increase future consumption. This explains why investment spending is more volatile than
consumption. The life-cycle hypothesis argues that households base their consumption decisions on
expected lifetime income and so they prefer to "smooth" consumption over time. They will thus save (and
invest) in periods of high income and defer consumption of this to periods of low income.

The other decision is the labor-leisure tradeoff. Higher productivity encourages substitution of current work
for future work since workers will earn more per hour today compared to tomorrow. More labor and less
leisure results in greater output, consumption, and investment today. On the other hand, there is an opposing
effect: since workers are earning more, they may not want to work as much today and in future periods.
However, given the pro-cyclical nature of labor, it seems that the above substitution effect dominates this
income effect.

Overall, the basic RBC model predicts that given a temporary shock, output, consumption, investment and
labor all rise above their long-term trends and hence formulate into a positive deviation. Furthermore, since
more investment means more capital is available for the future, a short-lived shock may have an impact in
the future. That is, above-trend behavior may persist for some time even after the shock disappears. This
capital accumulation is often referred to as an internal "propagation mechanism", since it may increase the
persistence of shocks to output.

A string of such productivity shocks will likely result in a boom. Similarly, recessions follow a string of bad
shocks to the economy. If there were no shocks, the economy would just continue following the growth
trend with no business cycles.

To quantitatively match the stylized facts in Table 1, Kydland and Prescott introduced calibration
techniques. Using this methodology, the model closely mimics many business cycle properties. Yet current
RBC models have not fully explained all behavior and neoclassical economists are still searching for better
variations.

The main assumption in RBC theory is that individuals and firms respond optimally over the long run. It
follows that business cycles exhibited in an economy are chosen in preference to no business cycles at all.
This is not to say that people like to be in a recession. Slumps are preceded by an undesirable productivity
shock which constrains the situation. But given these new constraints, people will still achieve the best
outcomes possible and markets will react efficiently. So when there is a slump, people are choosing to be in
that slump because given the situation, it is the best solution. This suggests laissez-faire (non-intervention) is
the best policy of government towards the economy but given the abstract nature of the model, this has been
debated.

A precursor to RBC theory was developed by monetary economists Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas in
the early 1970s. They envisioned the factor that influenced people's decisions to be misperception of wages
—that booms and recessions occurred when workers perceived wages higher or lower than they really
were. This meant they worked and consumed more or less than otherwise. In a world of perfect
information, there would be no booms or recessions.

Calibration
Unlike estimation, which is usually used for the construction of economic models, calibration only returns
to the drawing board to change the model in the face of overwhelming evidence against the model being
correct; this inverts the burden of proof away from the builder of the model. In fact, simply stated, it is the
process of changing the model to fit the data. Since RBC models explain data ex post, it is very difficult to
falsify any one model that could be hypothesised to explain the data. RBC models are highly sample
specific, leading some to believe that they have little or no predictive power.

Structural variables
Crucial to RBC models, "plausible values" for structural variables such as the discount rate, and the rate of
capital depreciation are used in the creation of simulated variable paths. These tend to be estimated from
econometric studies, with 95% confidence intervals. If the full range of possible values for these variables is
used, correlation coefficients between actual and simulated paths of economic variables can shift wildly,
leading some to question how successful a model which only achieves a coefficient of 80% really is.

Criticisms
The real business cycle theory relies on three assumptions which according to economists such as Greg
Mankiw and Larry Summers are unrealistic:[2]

1. The model is driven by large and sudden changes in available production technology.

Summers noted that Prescott is unable to suggest any specific technological shock for an
actual downturn apart from the oil price shock in the 1970s.[3] Furthermore there is no
microeconomic evidence for the large real shocks that need to drive these models. Real
business cycle models as a rule are not subjected to tests against competing
alternatives[4] which are easy to support.(Summers 1986)

2. Unemployment reflects changes in the amount people want to work.

 Paul Krugman argued that this assumption would mean that 25% unemployment at the
height of the Great Depression (1933) would be the result of a mass decision to take a long
vacation.[5]

3. Monetary policy is irrelevant for economic fluctuations.

Nowadays it is widely agreed that wages and prices do not adjust as quickly as needed to
restore equilibrium. Therefore most economists, even among the new classicists, do not
accept the policy-ineffectiveness proposition.[5]

Another major criticism is that real business cycle models can not account for the dynamics displayed by
U.S. gross national product.[6] As Larry Summers said: "(My view is that) real business cycle models of the
type urged on us by [Ed] Prescott have nothing to do with the business cycle phenomena observed in the
United States or other capitalist economies." —(Summers 1986)

See also
Austrian business cycle theory
Business cycle
Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium
Lucas critique
Monetary-disequilibrium theory
New classical economics
New Keynesian economics
Say's law
Welfare cost of business cycles
Benner Cycle

References
1. Helgadóttir, Oddný (2021). "How to make a super-model: professional incentives and the
birth of contemporary macroeconomics" (https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2021.1997786).
Review of International Political Economy. 30: 252–280.
doi:10.1080/09692290.2021.1997786 (https://doi.org/10.1080%2F09692290.2021.199778
6). ISSN 0969-2290 (https://search.worldcat.org/issn/0969-2290). S2CID 243791839 (https://
api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:243791839).
2. Cencini, Alvaro (2005). Macroeconomic Foundations of Macroeconomics (https://archive.org/
details/macroeconomicfou00cenc). Routledge. p. 40 (https://archive.org/details/macroecono
micfou00cenc/page/n59). ISBN 978-0-415-31265-3.
3. Summers, Lawrence H. (Fall 1986). "Some Skeptical Observations on Real Business Cycle
Theory" (https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/QR/QR1043.pdf) (PDF). Federal Reserve
Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review. 10 (4): 23–27.
4. George W. Stadler, Real Business Cycles (http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/kdsalyer/LE
CTURES/Ecn200e/Stadler.pdf), Journal of Economics Literatute, Vol. XXXII, December
1994, pp. 1750–1783, see p. 1772
5. Kevin Hoover (2008). "New Classical Macroeconomics" (http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/
NewClassicalMacroeconomics.html), econlib.org
 6. George W. Stadler, Real Business Cycles (http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/kdsalyer/LE
CTURES/Ecn200e/Stadler.pdf), Journal of Economics Literatute, Vol. XXXII, December
1994, pp. 1750–1783, see p. 1769

Further reading
Cooley, Thomas F. (1995). Frontiers of Business Cycle Research (https://books.google.com/
books?id=hfTf0u4JuRsC). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-04323-4.
Gomes, Joao; Greenwood, Jeremy; Rebelo, Sergio (2001). "Equilibrium Unemployment".
Journal of Monetary Economics. 48 (1): 109–152. doi:10.1016/S0304-3932(01)00071-X (http
s://doi.org/10.1016%2FS0304-3932%2801%2900071-X). S2CID 2503384 (https://api.seman
ticscholar.org/CorpusID:2503384).
Hansen, Gary D. (1985). "Indivisible labor and the business cycle". Journal of Monetary
Economics. 16 (3): 309–327. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.335.3000 (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewd
oc/summary?doi=10.1.1.335.3000). doi:10.1016/0304-3932(85)90039-X (https://doi.org/10.1
016%2F0304-3932%2885%2990039-X).
Heijdra, Ben J. (2009). "Real Business Cycles". Foundations of Modern Macroeconomics
(2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 495–552. ISBN 978-0-19-921069-5.
Kydland, Finn E.; Prescott, Edward C. (1982). "Time to Build and Aggregate Fluctuations".
Econometrica. 50 (6): 1345–1370. doi:10.2307/1913386 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F191338
6). JSTOR 1913386 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1913386).
Long, John B. Jr.; Plosser, Charles (1983). "Real Business Cycles". Journal of Political
Economy. 91 (1): 39–69. doi:10.1086/261128 (https://doi.org/10.1086%2F261128).
S2CID 62882227 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:62882227).
Lucas, Robert E. Jr. (1977). "Understanding Business Cycles". Carnegie-Rochester
Conference Series on Public Policy. 5: 7–29. doi:10.1016/0167-2231(77)90002-1 (https://do
i.org/10.1016%2F0167-2231%2877%2990002-1).
Plosser, Charles I. (1989). "Understanding real business cycles" (https://doi.org/10.1257%2F
jep.3.3.51). Journal of Economic Perspectives. 3 (3): 51–77. doi:10.1257/jep.3.3.51 (https://d
oi.org/10.1257%2Fjep.3.3.51). JSTOR 1942760 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1942760).
Romer, David (2011). "Real-Business-Cycle Theory". Advanced Macroeconomics
(Fourth ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. pp. 189–237. ISBN 978-0-07-351137-5.

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