Real business cycles and the test of the Adelmans *

Received August 1992, final version received January 1994

This paper conducts a modern variant of the test proposed and carried out by Adelman and Adelman (1959). Using the methods developed by Burns and Mitchell (1946), we see if we can distinguish between the economic series generated by an actual economy and those analogous artificial series generated by a stochastically perturbed economic model. In the case of the Adelmans, the model corresponded to the Klein–Goldberger equations. In our case, the model corresponds to a simple real business cycle model. The results indicate a fairly high degree of coincidence in key economic aggregates between the business cycle characteristics identified in actual data and those found in our simulated economy.