JPT (2011) investigate whether investment shocks are important drivers of business cycle fluctuations. To that end, and expanding on their previous work in JPT (2010), they estimate a New Keynesian model featuring imperfectly competitive goods and labor markets, as well as different nominal and real frictions such as sticky prices and wages, habit formation in consumption, variable capital utilization and investment adjustment costs.
The model has eight structural shocks in total, with three technology shocks, two of which are related to investment. Specifically, JPT distinguish between final and intermediate consumption, investment, and capital goods, each being produced in a different sector. They introduce a shock that affects the transformation of consumption into investment goods, and another shock that affects the transformation of investment goods into productive capital. The first, called investment-specific technology (IST) shock, is introduced via the production function in the investment good producing sector:
where
The second investment technology shock is introduced via the production technology in the capital good producing sector, which assumes that new capital, denoted with
where
The third technology shocks affects the production functions in the intermediate good producing sector according to:
where
The final consumption good
where
Similarly to the model in the previous section, there is a shock to the intertemporal preferences of the households populating the economy whose lifetime utility function is given by
where
where
The last two shocks are to government fiscal and monetary policy. Public spending
where the government spending shock
Monetary policy consists of setting the nominal interest rate
where
To summarize, there are eight shocks in the model, six stationary and two non-stationary. Two of the stationary shocks -- to price and wage markups, follow ARMA(1,1) processes, and one -- to monetary policy, is an i.i.d process. The remaining stationary shocks -- to government spending, MEI, and intertemporal preferences, as well as the growth rates of the two non-stationary shocks -- to IST and neutral technology, follow AR(1) processes. The disturbances to all shocks are assumed to be Gaussian, leading to a linear Gaussian state space representation of the solution of log-linear approximation of model.
JPT estimate the model using US data on hours worked (