Volatility and Growth: Governments are Key

There exists a persistent disagreement in the literature over the effect of business cycles on economic growth. This paper offers a solution to this disagreement, suggesting that volatility carries not only a positive direct effect, but also a negative indirect effect, operating through the insurance mechanism of government size. Theoretically, the net growth effect of volatility is then ambiguous. The paper reveals the underlying endogeneity of government size in a balanced panel of 90 countries from 1961 to 2010. In practice, the negative indirect channel dominates in democracies, but with less power to choose public services in autocratic regimes the positive direct effect takes over. Consequently, volatile growth rates are detrimental to growth in democracies, but beneficial to growth in autocracies. The empirical results suggest that a one standard deviation increase of volatility lowers growth by up to 0.52 percentage points in a democracy, but raises growth by 1.66 percentage points in a total autocracy. These findings point to a crucial intermediating role of governments in the relationship between volatility and growth. Both the size of the public sector and the regime form assume key roles.

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title: Cross-Country Evidence on the Link between Volatility and Growth
abstract: This paper presents empirical evidence against the standard dichotomy in macroeconomics that separates growth from the volatility of economic fluctuations. In a sample of 92 countries as well as a sample of OECD countries, we find that countries with higher volatility have lower growth. The addition of standard control variables strengthens the negative relationship. We also find that government spending-induced volatility is negatively associated with growth even after controlling for both time- and country-fixed effects.

title: How Robust is the Empirical Link between Business-Cycle Volatility and Long-Run Growth in OECD Countries?
abstract: It has been argued that business-cycle volatility dampens growth. This paper argues that this is no stylised fact. A review of the literature reveals that arguments in favour of no, or even a positive, impact of business-cycle volatility on growth are as convincing as the arguments pointing in the other direction. Empirical evidence using annual data for 24 OECD countries from 1960 to 2000, based on robust cross-country regressions and panel models, raises doubts about a clear negative impact of volatility on growth. Moreover, the hypothesis of Granger-non-causality of business-cycle volatility for growth cannot be rejected.

title: Is There a Core of Usable Macroeconomics We Should All Believe In
abstract: Real output in most advanced capitalist economies fluctuates around a rising trend. One can argue about whether it is best to think about that trend as passing through successive cyclical averages, defined in one way or another, or best to think of it as passing through cyclical peaks, or some other measure of "potential" output. While the outcome of that argument has consequences for macroeconomic theory, I will bypass it for now. The important observation is that, on the whole, the observed fluctuations around trend are contained within a moderately narrow corridor. Unemployment rates tend to run between, say, 5 percent and 10 percent in the United States. (Other countries have different typical ranges, and in each of them, the range can shift from time to time. It is important, theoretically and practically, to understand why; but that remains an open question.) There are notable exceptions to this generalization, of course, the most famous being the depression of the 1930's; but they are exceptions. Again it is important to know why fluctuations are so contained. This could reflect some natural equilibrating process, or it could reflect the intervention of automatic or discretionary government policy, or it could be a mixture of both. That is another issue on which opinions differ. I think it is part of the usable common core of macroeconomics that the trend movement is predominantly driven by the supply side of the economy (the supply of factors of production and total factor productivity) and that the appropriate vehicle for analyzing the trend motion is some sort of growth model, preferably mine. Now, what about those fluctuations around the trend of potential output? A moment ago I put the normal range of unemployment rates at 5-10 percent. By Okun's law I am talking about fluctuations of real GDP with an amplitude of 8-10 percent or so from peak to trough-contained, but not trivial. In my picture of the usable common core of macroeconomics, those fluctuations are predominantly driven by aggregate demand impulses, and the appropriate vehicle for analyzing them is some model of the various sources of expenditure. I am not so obtuse as not to have observed that the whole point of "real-business-cycle theory" is the assertion that these short-run motions of the economy are in fact supplydriven. But my view is that this explanation has been an empirical failure, or at best a nonsuccess. There are now two possibilities. As for the first, I entertain the hope that flexible, observant members of the real-business-cycle school, like Martin Eichenbaum and his coworkers, have come more or less to the same conclusion, and they have found ways to open up the fabric of their underlying model so that it will allow-or insist-that demand-side impulses play the dominant role in short-run macroeconomic fluctuations. Then this proposition is indeed part of the usable core of macroeconomics, and economists can go on to argue back and forth about the best way of modeling those demand-side forces. The other case is that the situation is as before, and the real-business-cycle school holds monolithically to the view that short-run fluctuations are just optimal supply-side adjustments to unforeseeable shocks to tastes and * Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139.

title: The link between volatility and growth: Evidence from the States
abstract: We present evidence on the relationship between output volatility and growth using state data. No evidence of such a relationship is found once other correlates of growth are incorporated into the analysis. This finding contradicts published results using international data; some possible explanations for the contradictory results are discussed.

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title: Virtues of bad times: interaction between productivity growth and economic fluctuations
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title: Uncertainty and Optimal Consumption Decisions
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title: The effects of wage volatility on growth
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title: Output volatility and economic growth
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title: The Fischer Black Hypothesis: Some Time-Series Evidence
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title: Uncertainty-driven growth
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title: Growth and Volatility
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title: Volatility and growth: Credit constraints and the composition of investment
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title: Long-Term Growth and Short-Term Economic Instability
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title: Business Cycle Volatility and Economic Growth: A Reassessment
abstract: One of the important implications of real business cycle theory is that there should be a positive relationship between economic fluctuations and economic growth, or, to be more specific, that the growth of real gross domestic product per capita should fall as the business cycle becomes less volatile. This is, of course, a conjecture that is open to empirical verification, at least in principle, but there are a variety of approaches that may be taken that will not necessarily yield consistent sets of findings. Altman (1995), for example, uses primarily the Maddison (1991) data set of some 13 countries from 1870 to 1986 and detrends using log-linear trend lines across benchmark years to obtain the cyclical component of output. He then uses rank and linear correlation techniques to assess the strength of a possible positive relationship between cyclical volatility-measured as the standard deviation of the cyclical component-and output growth across a variety of subperiods. Altman finds little evidence in favor of this implication of real business cycle models, but it may be argued that his conclusion relies heavily on two features of his empirical approach: the method used to construct the cyclical components and the correlation techniques employed to assess the strength of any relationship between cyclical volatility and growth. The aim of the present paper is to assess the robustness of this evidence by extending Altman's analysis in three directions. The first is to use a more extensive output per capita data set-we employ Maddison's (1995) updated set of22 countries, which now ends in 1994. We then employ several statistical techniques that are explicitly designed to extract business cycle components from annual economic time series and, finally, we use robust nonparametric methods to investigate the relationship between cyclical volatility and growth.

title: International evidence on the historical properties of business cycles
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title: Estimation and inference in econometrics
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title: Institutional Causes, Macroeconomic Symptoms: Volatility, Crises and Growth
abstract: Countries that have pursued distortionary macroeconomic policies, including high inflation, large budget deficits and misaligned exchange rates, appear to have suffered more macroeconomic volatility and also grown more slowly during the postwar period. Does this reflect the causal effect of these macroeconomic policies on economic outcomes? One reason to suspect that the answer may be no is that countries pursuing poor macroeconomic policies also have weak 'institutions,' including political institutions that do not constrain politicians and political elites, ineffective enforcement of property rights for investors, widespread corruption, and a high degree of political instability. This paper documents that countries that inherited more 'extractive' instit utions from their colonial past were more likely to experience high volatility a nd economic crises during the postwar period. More specifically, societies where European colonists faced high mortality rates more than 100 years ago are much more volatile and prone to crises. Based on our previous work, we interpret this relationship as due to the causal effect of institutions on economic outcomes: Europeans did not settle and were more likely to set up extractive institutions in areas where they faced high mortality. Once we control for the effect of institutions, macroeconomic policies appear to have only a minor impact on volatility and crises. This suggests that distortionary macroeconomic policies are more likely to be symptoms of underlying institutional problems rather than the main causes of economic volatility, and also that the effects of institutional differences on volatility do not appear to be primarily mediated by any of the standard macroeconomic variables. Instead, it appears that weak institutions cause volatility through a number of microeconomic, as well as macroeconomic, channels.

title: Political institutions and economic volatility
abstract: We examine the effect of political 'institutions' on economic growth volatility, using data from more than 100 countries over the period 1960 to 2005, taking into account various control variables as suggested in previous studies. Our indicator of volatility is the relative standard deviation of the growth rate of GDP per capita. The results of a dynamic panel model indicate that democracy reduces economic volatility. We also find that some dimensions of political instability and policy uncertainty increase economic volatility.

title: Why is GDP growth so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones ?
abstract: Why is GDP growth so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones? We identify four possible reasons: (i) poor countries specialize in more volatile sectors; (ii) poor countries specialize in fewer sectors; (iii) poor countries experience more frequent and more severe aggregate shocks (e.g. from macroeconomic policy); and (iv) poor countries' macroeconomic fluctuations are more highly correlated with the shocks of the sectors they specialize in. We show how to decompose volatility into these four sources, quantify their contribution to aggregate volatility, and study how they relate to the stage of development. We document the following regularities. First, as countries develop, their productive structure moves from more volatile to less volatile sectors. Second, the level of specialization declines with development at early stages, and slowly increases at later stages of development. Third, the volatility of country-specific macroeconomic shocks falls with development. Fourth, the covariance between sector-specific and country-specific shocks does not vary systematically with the level of development. We argue that many theories linking volatility and development are not consistent with these findings and suggest new directions for future theoretical work.

title: Openness, Country Size and the Government
abstract: This paper shows that smaller countries have a larger share of public consumption in GDP, and are also more open to trade. These empirical observations are consistent with recent theoretical models explaining country formation and break up, and may account for the observed positive empirical relationship between trade openness and government size.

title: How Accurate are Real-Time Estimates of Output Trends and Gaps?
abstract: Real-time estimates of output gaps and trends are important tools for macroeconomic analysis. But how accurate are estimates of real-time gaps and trends? This article discusses the problem of estimating gaps and trends in real time and constructs measures of their precision. The analysis is based on band-pass filtering methods augmented with univariate forecasts. The empirical analysis suggests that there is considerable uncertainty associated with real-time estimates of trends and gaps.

title: Measuring Business Cycles: Approximate Band-Pass Filters for Economic Time Series
abstract: Band-pass filters are useful in a wide range of economic contexts. This paper develops a set of approximate band-pass filters and illustrates their application to measuring the business-cycle component of macroeconomic activity. Detailed comparisons are made with several alternative filters commonly used for extracting business-cycle components.