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The Granular Origins of Aggregate Fluctuations

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TLDR
This article showed that idiosyncratic firm-level fluctuations can explain an important part of aggregate shocks, and provide a micro-foundation for aggregate productivity shocks, arguing that individual firm shocks average out in aggregate.
Abstract
This paper proposes that idiosyncratic firm-level fluctuations can explain an important part of aggregate shocks, and provide a microfoundation for aggregate productivity shocks. Existing research has focused on using aggregate shocks to explain business cycles, arguing that individual firm shocks average out in aggregate. I show that this argument breaks down if the distribution of firm sizes is fat-tailed, as documented empirically. The idiosyncratic movements of the largest 100 firms in the US appear to explain about one third of variations in output and the Solow residual. This "granular" hypothesis suggests new directions for macroeconomic research, in particular that macroeconomic questions can be clarified by looking at the behavior of large firms. This paper's ideas and analytical results may also be useful to think about the fluctuations of other economic aggregates, such as exports or the trade balance.

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References
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TL;DR: A model based on these two ingredients reproduces the observed stationary scale-free distributions, which indicates that the development of large networks is governed by robust self-organizing phenomena that go beyond the particulars of the individual systems.
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The Government Printing Office

TL;DR: In this article, the official journals of government are produced at their 1.5 million square foot plant, the largest industrial facility in the District and significant issues of outdated plant and equipment.
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Time to build and aggregate fluctuations

TL;DR: In this article, a general equilibrium model is developed and fitted to U.S. quarterly data for the post-war period, with the assumption that more than one time period is required for the construction of new productive capital and the non-time-separable utility function that admits greater intertemporal substitution of leisure.
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Probability: Theory and Examples

TL;DR: In this paper, a comprehensive introduction to probability theory covering laws of large numbers, central limit theorem, random walks, martingales, Markov chains, ergodic theorems, and Brownian motion is presented.
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