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This paper documents large differences across vintages in the properties of the widely-used quarterly utilization-adjusted TFP series produced by Fernald (2014), who provides updated data each quarter on his website. The most recent vintage of the adjusted TFP series has correlations with earlier vintages of the series that are less than 0.6. Compared to earlier vintages, the most recent vintage of the adjusted TFP data is more weakly correlated with output and more strongly negatively correlated with hours worked. I revisit the empirical analysis from Barsky and Sims (2011), who use an earlier vintage of Fernald's adjusted TFP data to identify impulse responses to news shocks about future productivity in a structural VAR. The vintage of adjusted TFP data matters for their estimated impulse responses, and in some specifications the differences using the most recent vintage of the adjusted TFP data are qualitatively large in a way that is more favorable to theories of news-driven business cycles.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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Innovations to measures of consumer confidence convey incremental information about economic activity far into the future. Comparing the shapes of impulse responses to confidence innovations in the data with the predictions of a calibrated New Keynesian model, we find little evidence of a strong causal channel from autonomous movements in sentiment to economic outcomes (the "animal spirits" interpretation). Rather, these impulse responses support an alternative hypothesis that the surprise movements in confidence reflect information about future economic prospects (the "information" view). Confidence innovations are best characterized as noisy measures of changes in expected productivity growth over a relatively long horizon.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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What is the impact of time-varying business uncertainty on economic activity? Using partly confidential business survey data from the U.S. and Germany in structural VARs, we find that positive innovations to business uncertainty lead to prolonged declines in economic activity. In contrast, their high-frequency impact is small. We find no evidence of the "wait-and-see"-effect – large declines of economic activity on impact and subsequent fast rebounds – that the recent literature associates with positive uncertainty shocks. Rather, positive innovations to business uncertainty have effects similar to negative business confidence innovations. Once we control for their low-frequency effect, we find little statistically or economically significant impact of uncertainty innovations on activity. We argue that high uncertainty events are a mere epiphenomenon of bad economic times: recessions breed uncertainty.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie