Productivity

Craig Burnside · Martin Eichenbaum

This 1994 NBER working paper (published in the *American Economic Review*, December 1996, 86(5): 1154-1174) asks whether letting firms vary how intensively they use their existing capital stock -- a …

Galina Vereshchagina

This paper quantifies how idiosyncratic firm-level risk affects aggregate output, TFP, and firm life-cycle growth in an environment where firm productivity evolves endogenously through risky …

Charles I. Jones

This Handbook of Economic Growth survey chapter lays out why treating ideas -- nonrivalrous instructions or recipes, as distinct from the rivalrous "objects" that embody them -- as a distinct input to …

Jeremy Greenwood · Zvi Hercowitz · Gregory W. Huffman

Keynes's idea that shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment drive fluctuations is placed inside a neoclassical model in which firms choose how hard to run their capital; a shock that raises the …

Jeremy Greenwood · Zvi Hercowitz · Per Krusell

This paper asks how much of postwar U.S. economic growth came from investment-specific technological change -- cheaper, more efficient new equipment -- as opposed to ordinary (Hicks-neutral) …

Natalie Bau · Adrien Matray

India liberalised foreign equity investment industry by industry in 2001 and 2006, and that staggered timing identifies what the policy did to the *distribution* of capital rather than only its level. …

Chang-Tai Hsieh · Peter J. Klenow

In a monopolistic-competition model with heterogeneous firms, a plant's revenue productivity should be equalised within an industry unless the plant faces distortions -- so the dispersion of revenue …

Rüdiger Bachmann · Christian Bayer · Heiko Stüber · Felix Wellschmied

When employers face a trade-off between growing large and paying low wages — that is, when they have monopsony power — some productive employers will decide to acquire fewer customers, forgo sales, …

Poorya Kabir · Eugene Tan · Ia Vardishvili

Standard measures of capital allocative efficiency—based on the dispersion of the average revenue product of capital (ARPK)—are severely biased when capital utilization is endogenous. When utilization …

Susanto Basu · John G. Fernald

This 1997 *Journal of Political Economy* paper (circulated as Federal Reserve International Finance Discussion Paper 546, March 1995) asks how large deviations from constant returns to scale and …

Qingen Gai · Naijia Guo · Bingjing Li · Qinghua Shi · Xiaodong Zhu

This paper asks why so much labor stays in low-productivity agriculture in developing countries, and treats the county-by-county rollout of China's New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) between 2009 and …

Paul Gaggl · Aspen Gorry · Christian vom Lehn

Gaggl, Gorry, and vom Lehn document that services sectors produce a rising share of output in both of the US production networks they study — the input-output network for intermediate inputs and the …

Robert M. Solow

Robert Solow's 1957 paper proposes a simple method for separating shifts in the aggregate production function ("technical change," broadly defined) from movements along it caused by capital …

Seda Basihos

Since the mid-1990s computing revolution, advanced economies have shown a cluster of regularities — a decade-long productivity boom followed by a slowdown below trend, a sharply declining labour …

Felipe Saffie · Liliana Varela · Kei-Mu Yi

Using the 2001 Hungarian capital account liberalization as a quasi-natural experiment and census-level firm data covering the entire economy (1992–2008), the paper identifies two channels through …

Robert E. Hall · Charles I. Jones

Hall and Jones ask why output per worker differs so enormously across countries -- more than 35-fold between the United States and Niger in 1988 -- and decompose the answer into physical capital …