| Summary: | Thesis advisor: Susanto Basu === Thesis advisor: Fabio Ghironi === Empirical studies highlight that countries that trade intermediate goods exhibit more synchronized business cycles. This positive correlation raises the question of causality. Traditional theoretical mechanisms propose the direction where higher bilateral trade in intermediate goods causes increased business cycle correlations. However, the data shows that trade is positively correlated with comovements in GDP as well as total factor productivity (TFP) and the current work in the literature explains only the first relation. I build a small open economy model that makes two contributions -- first, it predicts both positive correlations as seen in the data. Second, it explains potential causality in the reverse direction, i.e. countries might choose trade partners based on the properties of their business cycles. Specifically, the model predicts that when the elasticity of substitution between domestic capital and intermediate imports is low, i.e. the country is constrained by domestic technology, there is greater benefit from trading with a positively correlated source and self-insuring through capital accumulation. I provide empirical evidence of this condition in the data by estimating the elasticity of substitution between capital and intermediates by industry using a panel of countries. We use annual time series data and filtering methods to document the key statistics of the India business cycle. Output, consumption and investment are more volatile than in developed economies. Like in developed countries, consumption is less volatile and investment is more volatile than output in the Indian data. Unlike in the former, investment is not highly correlated with output. We test whether a standard real business cycle model with technology and fiscal shocks, with parameters calibrated for the Indian economy can replicate the features of the business cycle. === Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. === Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. === Discipline: Economics.
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