The growth-volatility relationship redux: what does volatility decomposition tell?

This paper revisits the empirical relationship between volatility and long-run growth, but the key contribution lies in decomposing growth volatility into its business-cycle and trend components. This volatility decomposition also accounts for enormous heterogeneity among countries in terms of their long-run growth trajectories. We identify a negative effect of trend volatility, which we refer to as long-run volatility, on growth, but no effect of business-cycle volatility. However, if long-run volatility is omitted, there would be a spurious (negative) effect of business-cycle volatility. Our results draw attention to a crucial question about different volatility measures and their implications in macroeconomic analyses.