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Working Paper
From Skills to Occupations: Comparative Advantage and Cross-Country Income Differences
Gottlieb, Charles; Monge-Naranjo, Alexander; Grobovsek, Jan (2025-10-08)
We revisit the role of human capital in cross-country income differences. We develop a general equilibrium model where workers of different skill groups sort into occupations by comparative advantage. Wages and employment depend on workers' skill quality, occupation-specific country-embedded productivity, and occupational distortions. Using harmonized microdata for 50 countries, we infer these components from the model's equilibrium conditions. Workers in rich countries exhibit higher skill quality and substantially greater productivity, especially in white-collar occupations. Human capital ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2025-11

Working Paper
High-Skilled Services and Development in China
Herrendorf, Berthold; Fang, Lei (2019-11-01)
We document that the employment share of high-skill-intensive services is much lower in China than in countries with similar gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. We build a model of structural change with goods and low- and high-skill-intensive services to account for this observation. We find that large distortions limit the size of high-skill-intensive services in China. If they were removed, both high-skill-intensive services and GDP per capita would increase considerably. We document a strong presence of state-owned enterprises in high-skill-intensive services and argue that this ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2019-21

Report
Why has the cyclicality of productivity changed?: what does it mean?
Wang, J. Christina; Fernald, John G. (2015-10-01)
Historically, U.S. labor productivity (output per hour) and total factor productivity (TFP) rose in booms and fell in recessions. Different models of business cycles explain this procyclicality differently. Traditional Keynesian models relied on "factor hoarding," that is, variations in how intensively labor and capital were utilized over the business cycle. Real business cycle (RBC) models instead posit that procyclical technology shocks drive the business cycle. Since the mid-1980s, however, the procyclicality of productivity has waned. TFP has been roughly acyclical with respect to ...
Current Policy Perspectives , Paper 15-6

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
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
Identifying Structural VARs with a Proxy Variable and a Test for a Weak Proxy
Lunsford, Kurt Graden (2015-12-04)
This paper develops a simple estimator to identify structural shocks in vector autoregressions (VARs) by using a proxy variable that is correlated with the structural shock of interest but uncorrelated with other structural shocks. When the proxy variable is weak, modeled as local to zero, the estimator is inconsistent and converges to a distribution. This limiting distribution is characterized, and the estimator is shown to be asymptotically biased when the proxy variable is weak. The F statistic from the projection of the proxy variable onto the VAR errors can be used to test for a weak ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1528

Working Paper
Rebuilding after Disaster Strikes: How Local Lenders Aid in the Recovery
Cortes, Kristle Romero (2014-11-12)
Using detailed employment data on firm age and size, I show that the presence of local finance improves job retention and creation at young and small firms. I use natural disasters and regulatory guidance to disentangle the effects of credit supply and demand. I find that an additional standard deviation of local finance offsets the negative effects of the disaster and can lead to 1 to 2% higher employment growth at either young or small firms. Banks increase lending but are not borrowing against future lending, nor do they experience changes in default rates. These findings suggest that ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1428

Working Paper
Firm Entry and Exit and Aggregate Growth
Asturias, Jose; Ruhl, Kim J.; Kehoe, Timothy J.; Hur, Sewon (2020-06-16)
Applying the Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan (FHK) (2001) decomposition to plant-level manufacturing data from Chile and Korea, we find that the entry and exit of plants account for a larger fraction of aggregate productivity growth during periods of fast GDP growth. Studies of other countries confirm this empirical relationship. To analyze this relationship, we develop a simple model of firm entry and exit based on Hopenhayn (1992) in which there are analytical expressions for the FHK decomposition. When we introduce reforms that reduce entry costs or reduce barriers to technology adoption ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-03R

Working Paper
Firm Entry and Exit and Aggregate Growth
Asturias, Jose; Ruhl, Kim J.; Kehoe, Timothy J.; Hur, Sewon (2019-02-01)
Applying the Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan (FHK) (2001) decomposition to plant-level manufacturing data from Chile and Korea, we find that the entry and exit of plants account for a larger fraction of aggregate productivity growth during periods of fast GDP growth. Studies of other countries confirm this empirical relationship. To analyze this relationship, we develop a simple model of firm entry and exit based on Hopenhayn (1992) in which there are analytical expressions for the FHK decomposition. When we introduce reforms that reduce entry costs or reduce barriers to technology adoption ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-03

Working Paper
Labor Substitutability among Schooling Groups
Kaymak, Barış; Wu, Kai-Jie; Bils, Mark (2022-03-23)
Knowing the degree of substitutability between schooling groups is essential to understanding the role of human capital in income differences and to assessing the economic impact of such policies as schooling subsidies, immigration systems, or redistributive taxes. We derive a lower bound for the substitutability required for worldwide growth in real GDP from 1960 to 2010 to be consistent with a stable wage premium for schooling despite the rapid growth in schooling, assuming no exogenous worldwide regress in the technology frontier for workers with only primary schooling. That lower bound ...
Working Papers , Paper 22-07

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