Search Results

(refine search)

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT

All:
Title:
Author:
Abstract:
Keywords:

+ Add Search Parameter

Report
The Great Recession, entrepreneurship, and productivity performance
Diez, Federico J. (2014-11-01)
In recent years, it is argued, the level of entrepreneurial activity in the United States has declined, causing concern because of its potential macroeconomic implications. In particular, it is feared that a lower rate of firm creation may be associated with lower productivity growth and, hence, lower economic growth in the coming years. This paper studies the issue, focusing on the dynamics of entrepreneurship and productivity around the time of the Great Recession. The author looks first at the recent evolution of alternative measures of entrepreneurship and of productivity, and then ...
Current Policy Perspectives , Paper 14-8

Working Paper
The Economic Effects of Firm-Level Uncertainty: Evidence Using Subjective Expectations
Fiori, Giuseppe; Scoccianti, Filippo (2021-06-28)
This paper uses over two decades of Italian survey data on business managers' expectations to measure subjective firm-level uncertainty and quantify its economic effects. We document that firm-level uncertainty persists for a few years and varies across firms' demographic characteristics. Uncertainty induces long-lasting economic effects over a broad array of real and financial variables. The source of uncertainty matters with firms responding only to downside uncertainty, that is, uncertainty about future adverse outcomes. Economy-wide uncertainty, constructed aggregating firm-level ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1320

Working Paper
Revisiting Adam Smith and the Division of Labor: New Evidence from U.S. Occupational Data, 1860–1940
Carollo, Nicholas A.; Cohen, Elior; Huang, Jingyi (2025-09-03)
Using novel occupational data from the United States between 1860 and 1940, we evaluate Adam Smith’s core propositions regarding the division of labor, market size, innovation, and productivity. We document significant growth in occupational diversity during this period using new measures of labor specialization that we construct from workers’ self-reported job titles in the decennial census. Consistent with Smith’s hypotheses, we find strong empirical evidence that labor specialization increases with the extent of the market, is facilitated by technological innovation, and is ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 25-08

Working Paper
Vanishing procyclicality of productivity?: industry evidence
Wang, J. Christina (2014-12-31)
The robust performance of U.S. labor productivity (LP) early in the recovery from the Great Recession contrasts markedly with the sluggish growth of output, and even more with the lack of recovery in employment. This pattern has renewed interest in understanding why productivity has become much less procyclical in recent decades. This is an important topic because the cyclicality of productivity has implications for how we model business cycles, and our understanding of how they are propagated. The topic also has implications for monetary policy because it affects the trend-cycle ...
Working Papers , Paper 14-15

Working Paper
Technological progress, the \"user cost of money,\" and the real output of banks
Basu, Susanto; Wang, J. Christina (2013-12-31)
Financial institutions provide their customers a variety of unpriced services and cover their costs through interest margins - the interest rates they receive on assets are generally higher than the rates they pay on liabilities. In particular, banks pay below-public-market interest rates on deposits while charging above-public-market rates on loans. Various authors have suggested that this situation allows one to measure the real quantity of financial services provided without explicit prices as proportional to the real stocks of financial assets held by households. We present a ...
Working Papers , Paper 13-21

Working Paper
Scalable versus Productive Technologies
Hubmer, Joachim; Salgado, Sergio; Ozkan, Serdar; Hong, Guangbin; Chan, Mons (2026-04-16)
CORRECT ORDER OF AUTHORS: Hubmer, Chan, Ozkan, Salgado, Hong. Are larger firms more productive, more scalable, or both? We use firm-level panel data from thirteen countries and employ a broad set of methods to estimate factor elasticities—capturing returns to scale (RTS)—and total factor productivity (TFP). We find substantial RTS heterogeneity within industries, with larger firms exhibiting higher RTS driven by greater intermediate input elasticities. TFP, by contrast, rises with firm size only up to the top decile before declining. The RTS–size gradient primarily reflects persistent, ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-019

Working Paper
ICT Services and their Prices: What do they tell us about Productivity and Technology?
Byrne, David M.; Corrado, Carol (2017-02-10)
This paper reassesses the link between ICT prices, technology, and productivity. To understand how the ICT sector could come to the rescue of a whole economy, we extend a multi-sector model due to Oulton (2012) to include ICT services (e.g., cloud services) and use it to calibrate the steady-state contribution of the ICT sector to growth in aggregate U.S. labor productivity. Because ICT technologies diffuse through the economy increasingly via purchases of cloud and data analytic services that are not fully accounted for in the standard narrative on ICT's contribution to economic growth, the ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2017-015

Report
The role of technology in mortgage lending
Schnabl, Philipp; Vickery, James; Fuster, Andreas; Plosser, Matthew (2018-02-01)
Technology-based (?FinTech?) lenders increased their market share of U.S. mortgage lending from 2 percent to 8 percent from 2010 to 2016. Using market-wide, loan-level data on U.S. mortgage applications and originations, we show that FinTech lenders process mortgage applications about 20 percent faster than other lenders, even when controlling for detailed loan, borrower, and geographic observables. Faster processing does not come at the cost of higher defaults. FinTech lenders adjust supply more elastically than other lenders in response to exogenous mortgage demand shocks, thereby ...
Staff Reports , Paper 836

Report
Financial Shocks, Productivity, and Prices
Lenzu, Simone; Rivers, David A.; Tielens, Joris; Hu, Shi (2026-04-01)
We study the interconnection between the productivity and pricing effects of financial shocks. Combining administrative records on firm-level output prices and quantities with quasi-experimental variation in credit supply, we show that a tightening of credit conditions has a persistent, yet delayed, negative effect on firms’ long-run physical productivity growth (TFPQ) but also induces firms to change their pricing policies. Commonly used revenue-based productivity measures (TFPR)—which conflate price and productivity—offer biased predictions regarding the consequences of financial ...
Staff Reports , Paper 1193

show more (77)

PREVIOUS / NEXT

Fed in Print

Search Results

FILTER BY year

FILTER BY Bank

FILTER BY Series

FILTER BY Content Type

FILTER BY Author

FILTER BY Jel Classification

FILTER BY Keywords