Byoungchan Lee

Abstract We study business cycles with cyclical returns to scale. Contrary to tightly parameterized conventional production functions, we empirically identify strong input complementarity that leads to procyclical returns to scale. We, therefore, propose a flexible translog production function that allows complementarity-induced procyclical returns to scale. We integrate this function into a standard medium-scale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model.

This paper investigates how tax changes for different income groups affect aggregate economic activity. I construct a measure of who received (or paid for) tax changes in the postwar period using tax return data from NBER’s TAXSIM. Variation in the income distribution across US states and federal tax changes generate variation in regional tax shocks that I exploit to test for heterogeneous effects.

We propose and study properties of several estimators of variance decomposition in the local-projections framework. We find for empirically relevant sample sizes that, after being bias corrected with bootstrap, our estimators perform well in simulations. We also illustrate the workings of our estimators empirically for monetary policy and productivity shocks. You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.