Despite empirical evidence of permanent damages to GDP after the 2008 global financial crisis, there is little theoretical consensus about the impact of the crisis on the unobservable rate of capacity utilization. In this paper, we investigate how the rate of capacity utilization reacts to shocks by testing the hypothesis that the normal rate of capacity utilization is exogenous and constant, against the alternative hypothesis that it is endogenous to demand and can vary with time. We find …[Lire la suite]