Summary: | Purpose – China's economic transition is essentially the process of China's institutional changes. During the changes, the appearance of institutional innovation is not regular; instead, it is intermittent and random. The purpose of this paper is to show that the fitful appearance of institutional innovation is the root of China's economic growth and fluctuations. Design/methodology/approach – This paper constructs a real business cycle (RBC) model introducing the institutional factor expressed in the quantitative form under the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) framework by measuring China's institutional changes quantitatively. Findings – By comparing the characteristics of the actual economic data with those of the simulated economic data, we find that this RBC model can explain 94.44%, 66.07%, 23.46%, 21.03% and 15.45% of the cyclical fluctuations in output, investment, labor, consumption and capital, respectively. Originality/value – The impulse response analysis finds that the institutional shocks have a relatively long duration, lasting about 30 years, and decline slowly over time, while technological shocks decline relatively fast, lasting approximately ten years.
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