TY  - JOUR
AU  - Blinder,Alan S.
AU  - Maccini,Louis J.
TI  - The Resurgence of Inventory Research:  What Have We Learned?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 3408
PY  - 1990
Y2  - August 1990
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3408
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3408.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alan S. Blinder
Department of Economics
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544-1021
Tel: 609/258-3358
Fax: 609/258-5398
E-Mail: blinder@princeton.edu

Louis J. Maccini
Department of Economics
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD   21218
Tel: 410/516-7607
E-Mail: Maccini@jhu.edu
AB  - Recent empirical and theoretical research on business inventories is surveyed and critically evaluated. While most inventory research has had macroeconomic motivations, we focus on its microtheoretic basis and on potential conflicts between theory and evidence. The paper asks two principal questions. First, how can inventories, which are allegedly used by firms to stabilize production, nonetheless be a destabilizing factor at the macroeconomic level? Second, why, if firms are following the production-smoothing model, is production more variable than sales in many industries? We suggest that the so-called (S,s) model may help answer both questions.
ER  -