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Keywords:productivity 

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.
FRBSF Economic Letter , Volume 2024 , Issue 31 , Pages 6

Journal Article
Understanding Global Trends in Long-run Real Interest Rates

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

Working Paper
Reshoring, Automation, and Labor Markets Under Trade Uncertainty

We study the implications of trade uncertainty for reshoring, automation, and U.S. labor markets. Rising trade uncertainty creates incentive for firms to reduce exposures to foreign suppliers by moving production and distribution processes to domestic producers. However, we argue that reshoring does not necessarily bring jobs back to the home country or boost domestic wages, especially when firms have access to labor-substituting technologies such as automation. Automation improves labor productivity and facilitates reshoring, but it can also displace jobs. Furthermore, automation poses a ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2024-16

Newsletter
The Global Diffusion of Ideas and Its Impact on Productivity and Growth

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
Understanding Climate Damages: Consumption versus Investment

Existing climate-economy models use aggregate damage functions to model the effects of climate change. This approach assumes climate change has equal impacts on the productivity of firms that produce consumption and investment goods or services. We show the split between damage to consumption and investment productivity matters for the dynamic consequences of climate change. Drawing on the structural transformation literature, we develop a framework that incorporates heterogeneous climate damages. When investment is more vulnerable to climate, we find short-run consumption losses will be ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2022-21

Working Paper
Productivity, nationalization, and the role of \"news\": lessons from the 1970s

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

Working Paper
From Population Growth to TFP Growth

Using a firm-dynamics model that has been extended to include endogenous growth, we examine how population growth influences total factor productivity (TFP) growth. The most important theoretical result is that the growth rate of surviving old businesses is a "sufficient statistic" to determine the direction and the magnitude of the impact of population growth on TFP growth. Following that, the model is calibrated for Japan and the United States. The main finding of examining balanced growth paths (BGPs) with various rates of population growth is that the effect on TFP growth is sizable. ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-006

Briefing
The Productivity Puzzle: AI, Technology Adoption and the Workforce

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

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"

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

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