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Journal Article
Productivity growth: causes and consequences - conference summary
This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at the conference "Productivity Growth: Causes and Consequences" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on November 18-19, 2005, under the sponsorship of the Bank's Center for the Study of Innovation and Productivity.
Working Paper
IT and beyond: the contribution of heterogeneous capital to productivity
This paper explores the relationship between capital composition and productivity using a unique and remarkably detailed data set on firm-level investment in the U.S. Using cross-sectional and longitudinal regressions, I find that several capital types, including computers, communications equipment, and software, are associated with current and subsequent years? productivity. The implied marginal products are derived and compared to official data on rental prices; substantial differences exist for a number of key capital types. I also provide evidence of complementaries and substitutabilities ...
Journal Article
Are fiscal stimulus funds going to the \\"right\\" states?
Are federal stimulus funds heading to those states best positioned to put the money to good use right away? This Letter compares the degree of economic need in different states with each state's expected share of funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Journal Article
Residual seasonality and monetary policy
Much recent discussion has suggested that the official real GDP data are inadequately adjusted for recurring seasonal fluctuations. A similar pattern of insufficient seasonal adjustment also affects the published data for a key measure of price inflation. Still, such residual seasonality in the published output and inflation statistics is unlikely to mislead Federal Reserve policymakers or adversely affect the setting of monetary policy.
Working Paper
The production-side approach to estimating embodied technological change
We estimate the rate of embodied technological change directly from plant-level manufacturing data on current output and input choices along with histories on their vintages of equipment investment. Our estimates range between 8 and 17 percent for the typical U.S. manufacturing plant during the years 1972-1996. Any number in this range is substantially larger than is conventionally accepted with some important implications. First, the role of investment-specific technological change as an engine of growth is even larger than previously estimated. Second, existing producer durable price ...
Working Paper
Measuring News Sentiment
This paper demonstrates state-of-the-art text sentiment analysis tools while developing a new time-series measure of economic sentiment derived from economic and financial newspaper articles from January 1980 to April 2015. We compare the predictive accuracy of a large set of sentiment analysis models using a sample of articles that have been rated by humans on a positivity/negativity scale. The results highlight the gains from combining existing lexicons and from accounting for negation. We also generate our own sentiment-scoring model, which includes a new lexicon built specifically to ...
Journal Article
The COVID-19 Fiscal Multiplier: Lessons from the Great Recession
The United States enacted a series of fiscal relief and stimulus bills in recent weeks, centered around the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The current fiscal response shares key similarities to the fiscal stimulus enacted during the Great Recession. Research over the past 10 years on the macroeconomic impact of that stimulus thus has important implications for the current fiscal response. The results point to a large potential impact on GDP.
Journal Article
The U.S. and world economic geography before and after the downturn: conference summary
This conference examined how the recent economic crisis has changed residential and development environments in many parts of the world. For example, the crisis has reduced home ownership and created pressure to increase neighborhood density in the United States. And, at least temporarily, it slowed migration in China to export-oriented urban areas. ; The conference was sponsored by the Center for the Study of Innovation and Productivity and was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco November 18, 2009.
Working Paper
The Road of Federal Infrastructure Spending Passes Through the States
Because federal infrastructure spending largely takes the form of grants to state governments, the macroeconomic impact of such packages depends on the share of federal grants that “passes through” to actual infrastructure spending done by states. A low degree of pass-through would tend to mute the economic impact from federal grants, reflecting a crowd-out effect on state spending. We first revisit Knight’s (2002) influential finding of near-zero pass-through (perfect crowd out) of federal highway grants. That result is found to be specification-sensitive and is reversed completely in ...
Working Paper
Fiscal Policies for Job Creation and Innovation: The Experiences of US States
This paper reviews selected fiscal policy initiatives undertaken by US states to encourage job creation and innovation. We begin with a discussion of some general considerations about the design of tax policies summarized in a tax policy design table. Four policies are reviewed: job creation tax credits, research and development tax credits, a set of tax policies targeted to the biotechnology industry, and a broad set of tax policies that attract star scientists. The experiences at the state level are used to evaluate the effectiveness of these employment and knowledge-capital tax incentives ...