3.2 Inference drawn from these facts
Now why did economists looking at these facts conclude that they ruled out
total factor productivity and other real shocks as being a significant contributor
to business cycle fluctuations? Their reasoning is as follows. Leisure and
consumption are normal goods. The evidence at that time was that the real
wage was acyclical, which implies no cyclical substitution effects and leaves
only the wealth effect. Therefore, in the boom when income is high, the
quantity of leisure should be high, when in fact it is low. This logic is based on
partial equilibrium reasoning, and the conclusion turned out to be wrong.
In the 1970s a number of interesting conjectures arose as to why the
economy fluctuated as it does. Most were related to finding a propagation
mechanism that resulted in Lucas’s monetary surprise shocks having
persistent real effects. With this theory, leisure moves countercyclically in con-
formity with observations. The deviations of output and employment from
trend are not persistent with this theory, but in fact they are persistent. This
initiated a search for some feature of reality that when introduced gives rise
to persistent real effects. To put it another way, economists searched for what
Frisch called a propagation mechanism for the effects of monetary surprises.
Taylor (1980) and Fischer (1977) provided empirical and theoretical evidence
in support of their conjecture that staggered nominal wage contracting might be the mechanism by which monetary shocks gave rise to persistent real
effects on output and employment. Another conjectured mechanism of that
era is the cost of changing nominal prices. In that era about the only people
who argued that real shocks were the factor were Long and Plosser (1983).
I say “in that era” because earlier, Wicksell (1907), Pigou (1927), and others
held the view that real shocks were an important contribution to business
cycles. My prior at the time we did the research for our “Time to Build” paper,
and I think Finn’s prior as well, was that business cycle fluctuations were
induced by nominal and not real shocks.