Testing the technology interpretation of news shocks
This article presents further evidence on the hypothesis of news driven business cycles. I use a structural Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) approach to identify news shocks as in Beaudry and Lucke (BL, 2010). I document three facts: first, news shocks identified by BL are Granger
causal for US patent data; second, BL's analysis applied to German macro data reveals very similar patterns: activity is largely driven by news, and news shocks explain a sizable and increasing share of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) variance at long horizons; and third, German news shocks
are Granger causal for German patent data and the pattern is, again, very similar to the US. Since patent data in the US and Germany are almost uncorrelated, the similarity is striking and strongly suggests a technology interpretation of news shocks.
Keywords: E32; business cycles; news
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: Department of Economics,University of Hamburg, von-Melle-Park 5D-20146 Hamburg, Germany
Publication date: 01 January 2013
- Editorial Board
- Information for Authors
- Subscribe to this Title
- Ingenta Connect is not responsible for the content or availability of external websites
- Access Key
- Free content
- Partial Free content
- New content
- Open access content
- Partial Open access content
- Subscribed content
- Partial Subscribed content
- Free trial content