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Journal Article
Productivity During and Since the Pandemic
U.S. labor productivity initially surged in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the massive economic upheaval. As the economy recovered, the level of productivity retreated to its slow pre-pandemic trend. As of mid-2024, it remained close to but just above that trend. The surge and retreat in productivity follows the pre-pandemic cyclical relationship in which U.S. productivity rises temporarily in recessions. This example highlights the need to look through temporary cyclical effects when trying to infer longer-run trends.
Working Paper
BLP Estimation Using Laplace Transformation and Overlapping Simulation Draws
We derive the asymptotic distribution of the parameters of the Berry et al. (1995, BLP) model in a many markets setting which takes into account simulation noise under the assumption of overlapping simulation draws. We show that, as long as the number of simulation draws R and the number of markets T approach infinity, our estimator is ?m = ?min(R,T) consistent and asymptotically normal. We do not impose any relationship between the rates at which R and T go to infinity, thus allowing for the case of R
Working Paper
The Impact of COVID on Productivity and Potential Output
The U.S. economy came into the pandemic, and looks likely to leave it, on a slow-growth path. The near- term level of potential output has fallen because of shortfalls in labor that should reverse over time. Labor productivity, to a surprising degree, has followed an accelerated version of its Great Recession path with initially strong growth followed by weak growth. But, as of mid-2022, it appears that the overall level of labor and total factor productivity are only modestly affected. The sign of the effect depends on whether we use the strong income-side measures of pandemic output growth ...
Working Paper
The Impact of COVID on Potential Output
The level of potential output is likely to be subdued post-COVID relative to its previous estimates. Most clearly, capital input and full-employment labor will both be lower than they previously were. Quantitatively, however, these effects appear relatively modest. In the long run, labor scarring could lead to lower levels of employment, but the slow pre-recession pace of GDP growth is unlikely to be substantially affected.
Working Paper
Missing Growth from Creative Destruction
Statistical agencies typically impute inflation for disappearing products from the inflation rate for surviving products. As some products disappear precisely because they are displaced by better products, inflation may be lower at these points than for surviving products. As a result, creative destruction may result in overstated inflation and understated growth. We use a simple model to relate this ?missing growth? to the frequency and size of various kinds of innovations. Using U.S. Census data, we then apply two ways of assessing the magnitude of missing growth for all private nonfarm ...
Journal Article
Are Markups Driving the Ups and Downs of Inflation?
How much impact have price markups for goods and services had on the recent surge and the subsequent decline of inflation? Since 2021, markups have risen substantially in a few industries such as motor vehicles and petroleum. However, aggregate markups—which are more relevant for overall inflation—have generally remained flat, in line with previous economic recoveries over the past three decades. These patterns suggest that markup fluctuations have not been a main driver of the ups and downs of inflation during the post-pandemic recovery.
Journal Article
How Does Business Dynamism Link to Productivity Growth?
The rate of business turnover has declined since the late 1970s, which some argue has hampered growth in innovation and productivity. This sounds like a plausible contributor to lackluster economic growth, but the connection between business turnover and productivity is more subtle. First, while business turnover has steadily declined over the past 35 years, aggregate productivity growth has not. Second, even when business starts were at historical highs, existing firms lost very little market share to new firms. This suggests that older firms are just as innovative as newcomers.
Journal Article
Future Output Loss from COVID-Induced School Closures
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused massive disruptions to the U.S. educational system. Research on school closures—particularly combined with parental income loss—implies that children are likely to attain lower levels of lifetime education compared with pre-pandemic trends. Projections show learning disruptions could lower the level of annual economic output ¼ percentage point on average over the next 70 years. The effect is small the first 5–10 years then peaks at a loss of ½ percentage point in about 25 years, when the children reach prime working age.
Journal Article
Missing Growth from Creative Destruction
When products disappear from the market with no substitutes from the same manufacturer, they may have been replaced by cheaper or better products from a different manufacturer. Official measurements typically approximate price changes from such creative destruction using price changes for products that were not replaced. This can lead to overstating inflation and, in turn, understating economic growth. A recent estimate suggests that around 0.6 percentage point of growth is missed per year. The bias has not increased over time, however, so it does not explain the slowdown in productivity ...
Working Paper
Innovative Growth Accounting
Recent work highlights a falling entry rate of new firms and a rising market share of large firms in the United States. To understand how these changing firm demographics have affected growth, we decompose productivity growth into the firms doing the innovating. We trace how much each firm innovates by the rate at which it opens and closes plants, the market share of those plants, and how fast its surviving plants grow. Using data on all nonfarm businesses from 1982-2013, we find that new and young firms (ages Oto 5 years) account for almost one-half of growth- three times their share of ...