Emerging economy business cycles: Interest rate shocks vs trend shocks

The recent literature studying the source of business cycles in emerging market economies (EMEs) has debated the relative importance of productivity trend shocks versus interest rate shocks coupled with financial frictions. The studies in which an important role is assigned to interest rate shocks do not force their models to match the historical paths of the world or country interest rate. We show that this leads to poorly identified interest rate shocks and inaccurate measures of contributions of shocks to EME business cycles. To address this issue, we estimate a small open economy model for Argentina and Mexico using Bayesian methods where the world and country interest rate series in the model are forced to match their data counterparts. This estimation strategy results in larger variations in interest rate shock and, therefore, shifts explanatory power away from trend shocks towards interest rate shocks, although both shocks remain important.