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Working Paper
Uncertainty Shocks in a Model of Effective Demand: Reply
de Groot, Richter, and Throckmorton (2018) argue that the model in Basu and Bundick (2017) can match the empirical evidence only because the model assumes an asymptote in the economy?s response to an uncertainty shock. In this Reply, we provide new results showing that our model?s ability to match the data does not rely either on assuming preferences that imply an asymptote nor on a particular value of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution. We demonstrate that shifting to preferences that are not vulnerable to the Comment?s critique does not change our previous conclusions about the ...
Working Paper
Some evidence on the importance of sticky wages
Nominal wage stickiness is an important component of recent medium-scale macroeconomic models, but to date there has been little microeconomic evidence supporting the assumption of sluggish nominal wage adjustment. We present evidence on the frequency of nominal wage adjustment using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) for the period 1996?1999. The SIPP provides high-frequency information on wages, employment, and demographic characteristics for a large and representative sample of the U.S. population. The main results of the analysis are as follows: (1) After ...
Discussion Paper
Risk bearing, implicit financial services, and specialization in the financial industry
What is the output of financial institutions? And how can we measure their nominal and, more importantly, real value, especially since many financial services are provided without explicit charges? This paper summarizes the theoretical result that, to correctly impute the nominal value of implicit financial service output, the ?user cost of money? framework needs to be extended to take account of the systematic risk in financial instruments. This extension is easy to implement in principle: One can continue using the current imputation procedure, and the only change needed is to adjust the ...
Journal Article
What do we know (and not know) about potential output?
Potential output is an important concept in economics. Policymakers often use a one-sector neoclassical model to think about long-run growth, and they often assume that potential output is a smooth series in the short run -- approximated by a medium- or long-run estimate. But in both the short and the long run, the one-sector model falls short empirically, reflecting the importance of rapid technological change in producing investment goods; and few, if any, modern macroeconomic models would imply that, at business cycle frequencies, potential output is a smooth series. Discussing these ...
Working Paper
Endogenous volatility at the zero lower bound: implications for stabilization policy
At the zero lower bound, the central bank's inability to offset shocks endogenously generates volatility. In this setting, an increase in uncertainty about future shocks causes significant contractions in the economy and may lead to non-existence of an equilibrium. The form of the monetary policy rule is crucial for avoiding catastrophic outcomes. State-contingent optimal monetary and fiscal policies can attenuate this endogenous volatility by stabilizing the distribution of future outcomes. Fluctuations in uncertainty and the zero lower bound help our model match the unconditional and ...
Journal Article
Information and communications technology as a general purpose technology: evidence from U.S. industry data
Many people point to information and communications technology (ICT) as the key for understanding the acceleration in productivity in the United States since the mid-1990s. Stories of ICT as a general purpose technology (GPT) suggest that measured total factor productivity (TFP) should rise in ICT-using sectors (reflecting either unobserved accumulation of intangible organizational capital, spillovers, or both), but with a long lag. Contemporaneously, however, investments in ICT may be associated with lower TFP as resources are diverted to reorganization and learning. We find that U.S. ...
Working Paper
Productivity growth in the 1990s: technology, utilization, or adjustment
Measured productivity growth increased substantially during the second half of the 1990s. This paper examines whether this increase owes to an increase in the rate of technological change or whether it can be explained by non-technological factors relating to factor utilization, factor accumulation, or returns to scale. It finds that the recent increase in productivity growth does appear to arise from an increase in technological change. Cyclical utilization raised measured productivity growth relative to technology growth in the first part of the expansion, but lowered it subsequently. ...
Working Paper
Productivity, welfare, and reallocation: theory and firm-level evidence
We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by the current and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. The equivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies total factor productivity (TFP) as the right summary measure of welfare (even in situations where it does not properly measure technology) and makes it possible to calculate the contributions of disaggregated units (industries or firms) to aggregate welfare using readily available TFP data. Based on ...
Working Paper
Are technology improvements contractionary?
We construct a measure of aggregate technology change, controlling for imperfect competition, varying utilization of capital and labor, and aggregation effects. On impact, when technology improves, input use falls sharply, and output may fall slightly. With a lag of several years, inputs return to normal and output rises strongly. These results are inconsistent with frictionless dynamic general equilibrium models, which generally predict that technology improvements are expansionary, with inputs and (especially) output rising immediately. However, the results are consistent with plausible ...