观察冲击

Observing Shocks

History of Political Economy · 2012
被引 15
人大 A-ABS 2

中文导读

追溯了冲击概念在宏观经济学中的历史演变,从1920年代到现代DSGE模型,探讨其作为不可观测现象如何被用于解释经济波动,对理解经济学方法论和模型构建有用。

Abstract

Macroeconomists have observed business cycle fluctuations over time by constructing and manipulating models in which shocks have increasingly played a greater role. Shock is a term of art that pervades modern economics appearing in nearly one-quarter of all journal articles in economics and in nearly half in macroeconomics. Surprisingly, its rise as an essential element in the vocabulary of economists can be dated only to the early 1970s. We trace the history of shocks in macroeconomics from Ragnar Frisch and Eugen Slutsky in the 1920s and 1930s through real business cycle and DSGE models and to the use of shocks as generators of impulse-response functions, which are in turn used as data in matching estimators. The history is organized around the observability of shocks. As well as documenting a critical conceptual development in economics, the history of shocks shows that James Bogen and James Woodward’s distinction between data and phenomena must be substantially relativized if it is to be at all plausible.

经济冲击商业周期可观测性宏观经济学史