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Journal Article
Productivity During and Since the Pandemic
Fernald, John G.; Li, Huiyu; Meisenbacher, Brigid C.; Yalcin, Aren S. (2024-11-25)
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.
FRBSF Economic Letter , Volume 2024 , Issue 31 , Pages 6

Journal Article
Understanding Global Trends in Long-run Real Interest Rates
Yi, Kei-Mu; Zhang, Jing (2017)
The authors explore trends in long-run real interest rates and their underlying factors for the 20 largest economies from the 1950s through the present day. {{p}}Real, or inflation-adjusted, interest rates may well be the most important prices for any nation?s economy. They govern intertemporal purchasing decisions facing households, firms, and all levels of government. That is, virtually all interactions in the marketplace that entail making a choice between spending now and spending later necessarily involve real interest rates, which specify the real cost of borrowing to make a purchase ...
Economic Perspectives , Issue 2 , Pages 1-20

Newsletter
The Global Diffusion of Ideas and Its Impact on Productivity and Growth
Oberfield, Ezra; Buera, Francisco J. (2016)
Economic growth often comes hand in hand with the growth of trade. However, according to quantitative models that rely on standard static mechanisms, the gains from trade are fairly small. This article introduces a model to study the diffusion of ideas across countries as a means of increasing productivity and provides a quantitative assessment of the role of trade in the transmission of knowledge.
Chicago Fed Letter

Working Paper
Productivity, nationalization, and the role of \"news\": lessons from the 1970s
Cakir Melek, Nida (2014-06-01)
The number of occurrences of an old phenomenon, expropriation of foreign-owned property, had peaked in the 1970s, and virtually every significant oil-producing developing country had nationalized its oil. Nationalization again was on the rise in the 2000s. Using novel data, this paper examines nationalization and its effect on productivity. First, we document historical global trends in expropriations, and examine the effect from the 1960s to the 1990s in a sample of oil-producing developing countries. We show that nationalization brings significant productivity losses. Then, we focus on ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 14-6

Briefing
The Productivity Puzzle: AI, Technology Adoption and the Workforce
Henry, Erin; Sarte, Pierre-Daniel G.; Taylor, Jack (2024-08)
In 1987, economist Robert Solow said, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."1 This quote underscores the challenges in tracing the effects of information technology and automation on productivity and the economy at large. Understanding the role of technology in labor productivity growth remains an ongoing quest in economics, one made even more pertinent by recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) as well as the further adoption of generative AI and large language models (LLMs).Estimates of the effect of AI on economic and productivity growth range ...
Richmond Fed Economic Brief , Volume 24 , Issue 25

Briefing
How Domestic Outsourcing Affects the Labor Market
Macaluso, Claudia (2023-11)
In this article, I focus on a few ways domestic outsourcing affects our understanding of the labor market. Jobs filled and emptied by temporary workers are never included in the official tally of job creation and job destruction, which leads to significantly underestimating the magnitude of labor market flows. Domestic outsourcing also changes the interpretation of firm reactions to productivity changes, as well as the magnitude and meaning of a secular decline in measures of labor market dynamism such as the job reallocation rate. Outsourcing is important for plants in modifying their ...
Richmond Fed Economic Brief , Volume 23 , Issue 36

Report
Productivity spillovers, terms of trade, and the "home market effect"
Pesenti, Paolo; Corsetti, Giancarlo; Martin, Philippe (2005-02-01)
This paper analyzes the welfare implications of international spillovers related to productivity gains, changes in market size, or government spending. We introduce trade costs and endogenous varieties in a two-country general-equilibrium model with monopolistic competition, drawing a distinction between productivity gains from manufacturing efficiency and those related to firms' lower cost of entry or product differentiation. Our model suggests that countries with lower manufacturing costs have higher GDP but supply a smaller number of goods at a lower international price. Countries with ...
Staff Reports , Paper 201

Discussion Paper
The Mysterious Slowdown in U.S. Manufacturing Productivity
Pearce, Jeremy; Lashkari, Danial (2024-07-11)
Throughout the twentieth century, steady technological and organizational innovations, along with the accumulation of productive capital, increased labor productivity at a steady rate of around 2 percent per year. However, the past two decades have witnessed a slowdown in labor productivity, measured as value added per hour worked. This slowdown has been particularly stark in the manufacturing sector, which historically has been a leading sector in driving the productivity of the aggregate U.S. economy. What makes this slowdown particularly puzzling is the fact that manufacturing accounts for ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20240711

The Impact of Generative AI on Work Productivity
Bick, Alexander; Blandin, Adam; Deming, David (2025-02-27)
Workers using generative AI reported they saved 5.4% of their work hours in the previous week, which suggests a 1.1% increase in productivity for the entire workforce.
On the Economy

Working Paper
The Cross-Section of Labor Leverage and Equity Returns
Donangelo, Andres; Gourio, François; Kehrig, Matthias; Palacios, Miguel (2017-09-04)
Using a standard production model, we demonstrate theoretically that, even if labor is fully flexible, it generates a form of operating leverage if (a) wages are smoother than productivity and (b) the capital-labor elasticity of substitution is strictly less than one. Our model supports using labor share?the ratio of labor expenses to value added?as a proxy for labor leverage. We show evidence for conditions (a) and (b), and we demonstrate the economic significance of labor leverage: High labor-share firms have operating profits that are more sensitive to shocks, and they have higher expected ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2017-22

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