TY - JOUR AU - Acemoglu, Daron AU - Akcigit, Ufuk AU - Kerr, William TI - Networks and the Macroeconomy: An Empirical Exploration JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 21344 PY - 2015 Y2 - July 2015 DO - 10.3386/w21344 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21344 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21344.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Daron Acemoglu Department of Economics, E52-446 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 Tel: 617/253-1927 Fax: 617/253-1330 E-Mail: daron@mit.edu Ufuk Akcigit Department of Economics University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Street Saieh Hall, Office 403 Chicago, IL 60637 E-Mail: uakcigit@uchicago.edu William R. Kerr Harvard Business School Rock Center 212 Soldiers Field Boston, MA 02163 Tel: 617/496-7021 E-Mail: wkerr@hbs.edu M1 - published as Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, William Kerr. "Networks and the Macroeconomy: An Empirical Exploration," in Martin Eichenbaum and Jonathan A. Parker, editors, "NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2015, Volume 30" University of Chicago Press (2016) AB - The propagation of macroeconomic shocks through input-output and geographic networks can be a powerful driver of macroeconomic fluctuations. We first exposit that in the presence of Cobb-Douglas production functions and consumer preferences, there is a specific pattern of economic transmission whereby demand-side shocks propagate upstream (to input-supplying industries) and supply-side shocks propagate downstream (to customer industries) and that there is a tight relationship between the direct impact of a shock and the magnitudes of the downstream and the upstream indirect effects. We then investigate the short-run propagation of four different types of industry-level shocks: two demand-side ones (the exogenous component of the variation in industry imports from China and changes in federal spending) and two supply-side ones (TFP shocks and variation in knowledge/ideas coming from foreign patenting). In each case, we find substantial propagation of these shocks through the input-output network, with a pattern broadly consistent with theory. Quantitatively, the network-based propagation is larger than the direct effects of the shocks. We also show quantitatively large effects from the geographic network, capturing the fact that the local propagation of a shock to an industry will fall more heavily on other industries that tend to collocate with it across local markets. Our results suggest that the transmission of various different types of shocks through economic networks and industry interlinkages could have first-order implications for the macroeconomy. ER -