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ECONOMIC REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

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Figure 2-xv<br />

Business Fixed Investment - Actual vs. Accelerator Model, 1991–2016<br />

Percent Change, Annual Rate<br />

30<br />

20<br />

Actual Business<br />

Fixed<br />

Investment<br />

10<br />

2016:Q3<br />

0<br />

-10<br />

Model<br />

-20<br />

-30<br />

1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015<br />

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, CEA calculations<br />

2-xv.1 The uptick in output growth after the crisis spurred faster investment<br />

growth in 2011 but the slowdown in growth in 2015-16 contributed<br />

to a slowdown in investment growth more recently, though investment<br />

growth is still somewhat weaker than this model would predict over this<br />

past year. Importantly, the model shows that changes in global growth—<br />

not just domestic growth—affect business investment, consistent with<br />

findings from the IMF and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation<br />

and Development (OECD) (IMF 2015a; OECD 2015).<br />

Several factors that have historically mattered for investment<br />

growth have little explanatory power in the recent slowdown. These<br />

include two main financial stress measures, the credit spread (the gap<br />

between treasury yields and corporate bond yields that is sometimes seen<br />

as a measure of concerns for financial risk in the economy) and an index<br />

of tightness of loan conditions. Both of these increased recently, but not<br />

enough to have any explanatory power in the investment slowdown.<br />

Therefore, constraints on credit or in the financial system cannot explain<br />

on their own the slowdown in business investment over the last year and<br />

1 The standard “accelerator” model assumes that investment growth is a function of the<br />

change in the growth of real GDP because firms target a level of the capital stock that moves<br />

with the overall level of GDP. The accelerator model can be estimated using first or second<br />

differences of the relevant series. CEA ran both specifications – Figure 2-xv shows the<br />

results using the model where changes in investment are driven by lags of itself as well as the<br />

second difference of US and a foreign trade-weighted GDP aggregate. As Figure 2-xv shows,<br />

this specification closely matches investment growth.<br />

The Year in Review and the Years Ahead | 111

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