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Working Paper
The Outlook for U.S. Labor-Quality Growth
Over the past 15 years, labor-quality growth has been very strong?defying nearly all earlier projections?and has added around 0.5 percentage points to an otherwise modest U.S. productivity picture. Going forward, labor quality is likely to add considerably less and may even be a drag on productivity growth in the medium term. Using a variety of methods, we project that potential labor-quality growth in the longer run (7 to 10 years out) is likely to fall in the range of 0.1 to 0.25 percent per year. In the medium term, labor-quality growth could be lower or even negative, should employment ...
Working Paper
Aggregate productivity and the productivity of aggregates
Explanations of procyclical productivity playa key role in a variety of business-cycle models. Most of these models, however, explain this procyclicaIity within a representative-firm paradigm. This procedure is misleading. We decompose aggregate productivity changes into several terms, each of which has an economic interpretation. However, many of these tenus measure composition effects such as reallocations of inputs across productive units. We apply this decomposition to U.S. data by aggregating from roughly the two-digit level to the private economy. We find that the compositional terms ...
Working Paper
Is China Fudging Its GDP Figures? Evidence from Trading Partner Data
We propose using imports, measured as reported exports of trading partners, as an alternative benchmark to gauge the accuracy of alternative Chinese indicators (including GDP) of fluctuations in economic activity. Externally-reported imports are likely to be relatively well measured, as well as free from domestic manipulation. Using principal components, we derive activity indices from a wide range of indicators and examine their fit to (trading-partner reported) imports. We choose a preferred index of eight non-GDP indicators (which we call the China Cyclical Activity Tracker, or C-CAT). ...
Working Paper
Productivity and Potential Output Before, During, and After the Great Recession
U.S. labor and total-factor productivity growth slowed prior to the Great Recession. The timing rules explanations that focus on disruptions during or since the recession, and industry and state data rule out ?bubble economy? stories related to housing or finance. The slowdown is located in industries that produce information technology (IT) or that use IT intensively, consistent with a return to normal productivity growth after nearly a decade of exceptional IT-fueled gains. A calibrated growth model suggests trend productivity growth has returned close to its 1973-1995 pace. Slower ...
Journal Article
The recent rise and fall of rapid productivity growth
Information technology fueled a surge in U.S. productivity growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, this rapid pace proved to be temporary, as productivity growth slowed before the Great Recession. Furthermore, looking through the effects of the economic downturn on productivity, the reduced pace of productivity gains has continued and suggests that average future output growth will likely be relatively slow.
Journal Article
On the reliability of Chinese output figures
Some commentators have questioned whether China?s economy slowed more in 2012 than official gross domestic product figures indicate. However, the 2012 reported output and industrial production figures are consistent both with alternative Chinese indicators of the country?s economic activity, such as electricity production, and trade volume measures reported by non-Chinese sources. These alternative domestic and foreign sources provide no evidence that China?s economic growth was slower than official data indicate.
Working Paper
The Productivity Slowdown in Advanced Economies: Common Shocks or Common Trends?
This paper reviews advanced-economy productivity developments in recent decades. We focus primarily on the facts about, and explanations for, the mid-2000s labor-productivity slowdown in large European countries and the United States. Slower total factor productivity growth was the proximate cause of the slowdown. This conclusion is robust to measurement challenges including the role of intangible assets, rankings of productivity levels, and data revisions. We contrast two main narratives for the stagnating productivity frontier: The shock of the Global Financial Crisis; and a common slowdown ...
Working Paper
Why has China survived the Asian crisis so well? What risks remain?
China's strong growth in the midst of the Asian crisis is striking. We explore features of China's financial system that helped insulate it from the crisis, and then try to assess whether China has avoided crisis or simply deferred it. We argue that regardless of whether the Asian crisis resulted from weak fundamentals or from "country runs" by investors, it is not surprising that China has survived so far. In a market-oriented system, pressures generally force rapid adjustment when institutions are, or are perceived to be, insolvent; these mechanisms do not operate fully in China. In ...
Working Paper
Puzzles in the Chinese stock market
Many companies on China's stock markets have separate, restricted classes of shares for domestic residents and foreigners. Other than who can own them, these shares are identical, but foreigners pay only about one-quarter the price paid by domestic residents. We show that plausible differences--about 4 percentage-points--in expected rates of return by foreign and domestic investors can account for the generally higher level and volatility of prices for domestic shares relative to foreign shares. We attribute low Chinese expected returns to the limited alternative investments available in ...
Working Paper
Does the United States have a productivity slowdown or a measurement problem?
After 2004, measured growth in labor productivity and total-factor productivity (TFP) slowed. We find little evidence that the slowdown arises from growing mismeasurement of the gains from innovation in IT-related goods and services. First, mismeasurement of IT hardware is significant prior to the slowdown. Because the domestic production of these products has fallen, the quantitative effect on productivity was larger in the 1995-2004 period than since, despite mismeasurement worsening for some types of IT?so our adjustments make the slowdown in labor productivity worse. The effect on TFP is ...