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Economic Fluctuations in the U.S. and Euro Area: Quantifying the Contribution of Technical Change
Author(s) -
Di Pietro Marco,
Saltari Enrico
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
southern economic journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.762
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 2325-8012
pISSN - 0038-4038
DOI - 10.1002/soej.12271
Subject(s) - economics , dynamic stochastic general equilibrium , technical change , business cycle , volatility (finance) , technological change , technical progress , econometrics , variance decomposition of forecast errors , elasticity of substitution , capital (architecture) , variance (accounting) , constant elasticity of substitution , output elasticity , macroeconomics , production (economics) , productivity , monetary policy , history , archaeology , accounting
This article aims at quantifying the contribution of technical change to cyclical fluctuations in the U.S. and euro area. We distinguish technical progress in labor‐augmenting and capital‐augmenting change. To this end, we derive and estimate a New Keynesian DSGE model embodying a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function for both areas. Our main findings are: (i) capital‐augmenting progress is the main source of technical change volatility; (ii) labor‐augmenting shocks give a negligible contribution to the variance of output; (iii) technical change (of both types) explains more economic fluctuations in the U.S. than in the euro area; and (iv) historical decomposition of GDP growth over our sample period (1980–2008) shows that capital‐augmenting progress is one of the key drivers of the business cycle.