期刊名称：Departmental Discussion Papers / University of Glasgow, Department of Economics
出版年度：2008
卷号：1
出版社：University of Glasgow, Department of Economics
摘要：This paper shows that introducing weak property rights in the standard real
business cycle (RBC) model can help to explain economic fluctuations. This is motivated by
the empirical observation that changes in institutions in emerging markets are related to the
evolution of the main macroeconomic variables. In particular, in Mexico, the movements in
productivity in the data are associated with changes in institutions, so that we can explain
productivity shocks to a large extent as shocks to the quality of institutions. We find that the
model with shocks to the degree of protection of property rights only - without technology
shocks - can match the second moments in the data for Mexico well. In particular, the fit is
better than that of the standard neoclassical model with full protection of property rights
regarding the auto-correlations and cross-correlations in the data, especially those related to
labor. Viewing productivity shocks as shocks to institutions is also consistent with the
stylized fact of falling productivity and non-decreasing labor hours in Mexico over 1980-1994,
which is a feature that the neoclassical model cannot match.
