St. Louis Fed  |   Economic Research  |   EconDISC®  |   FRED®  |   GeoFRED®  |   ALFRED®  |   CASSIDI®  |   FRASER®  |   Liber8®  |   APIs  |   Fed System Help 
Logo: Economic Research, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
 
Employment  |   Seminars  |   Monetary Aggregates  |   Tracking the Recession  
Search | View by Year | View by Category | View by Author | View by JEL Code

"Input and Output Inventory Dynamics"
by Yi Wen

This paper develops an analytically-tractable general-equilibrium model of inventory dynamics based on a precautionary stockout-avoidance motive. The model’s predictions are broadly consistent with the U.S. business cycle and key features of inventory behavior, including (i) a large inventory stock-to-sales ratio and a small inventory investment-to-sales ratio in the long run, (ii) excess volatility of production relative to sales, (iii) procyclical inventory investment but countercyclical stock-to-sales ratio over the business cycle, and (iv) more volatile input inventories than output inventories. It is also shown that technological improvement of inventory management (that eliminates production/ordering lags) can increase, rather than decrease, the volatility of aggregate output. Key to this seemingly counter-intuitive result is that a stockout- avoidance motive leads to procyclical liquidity-value of inventories (hence, procyclical relative prices of output), which acts as an automatic stabilizer that discourages final sales in a boom and encourages final sales during a recession, thereby reducing the variability of GDP.

Full Text - Acrobat PDF (773k)

Notify Me of Updates for:
Category > Monetary Policy/Macroeconomics
Author > Yi Wen
Research Papers and Publications: JEL Code > E13
Research Papers and Publications: JEL Code > E20
Research Papers and Publications: JEL Code > E32


  About | Contact Us | Privacy | Legal Top of Page