This presentation is part of: E30-2 Business Fluctuations and Cycles

Revisiting Cross-Country Correlation Anomalies

Marc-Andre Letendre, Ph.D.1, Alok Johri, Ph.D.1, and Daqing Luo, Ph.D.2. (1) Economics, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON L8S4M4, Canada, (2) The School of Economics, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, Shanghai, 905.521.8232, China

It is well known that the two-country real business cycle model (as initially proposed by Backus, Kehoe and Kydland (1992)) has difficulty producing positive cross-country correlations of hours worked and investment. Recently, Baxter and Farr (2005) found that adding endogenous capital utilization rates to a two-country model raises these correlations. However, their results show that for realistic parameter values, the model still cannot match both correlations simultaneously as the cross-country correlation of investment is consistently too low. A first contribution of this paper is to show that learning-by-doing is another mechanism that raises the cross-country correlations of investment and hours. A second contribution is the finding that a two-country model with learning-by-doing and endogenous capital utilization produces positive cross-country correlations of hours and investment that are in the range observed empirically. A third contribution is to show that the model with learning-by-doing and capital utilization can produce positive cross-country correlations of output, consumption, investment and hours when technology shocks are uncorrelated across countries and there are international spillovers in the accumulation of organizational capital.