학술논문

The Return to Capital and the Business Cycle
Document Type
article
Source
Subject
return to capital
volatility
real business cycles
Language
Abstract
We measure the return to capital directly from the NIPA and BEA data and examine the return implications of the real business cycle model. We construct a quarterly time series of the after-tax return to business capital. Its volatility is considerably smaller than that of S&P 500 returns. The standard business cycle model captures almost 50% of the volatility in the return to capital (relative to the volatility of output). We consider several departures from the benchmark model; the most promising is one with stochastic taxes which captures nearly 80% of the relative volatility in the return to capital.