NBER Publications by Roman Sustek

Over the U.S. business cycle, fluctuations in residential investment are well known to systematically lead GDP. These dynamics are documented here to be specific to the U.S. and Canada. In other developed economies residential investment is broadly coincident with GDP. Nonresidential investment has the opposite dynamics, being coincident with or lagging GDP. These observations are in sharp contrast with the properties of nearly all business cycle models with disaggregated investment. Including mortgages and interest rate dynamics aligns the theory more closely with U.S. observations. Longer time to build in housing construction makes residential investment coincident with output.

Cyclical fluctuations in nominal variables—aggregate price levels and nominal interest rates—are documented to be substantially more synchronized across countries than cyclical fluctuations in real output. A transparent mechanism that can account for this striking feature of the nominal environment is highlighted. It is based on (small) cross-country spillovers of shocks and an interaction between Taylor rules and no-arbitrage conditions. The mechanism is quantitatively important for a wide range of plausible parameterizations and is found to be robust to modifications of the economic environment that help account for other important features of domestic and international aggregate fluctuations.