The comovement in inventories and in sales: Higher and higher

We re-examine changes in the cross-section correlation pattern of sales and inventories using Ng's [Ng, S., 2006, Testing cross-section correlation in panel data using spacings, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 24 (1), 12-23] “uniform spacing” method, which permits the estimation of the number of correlated pairs and focuses on the conditional correlations. In contrast to the literature, we find that the correlation of shocks across industries increased after the 'Great Moderation'.