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Working Paper
High-Skilled Services and Development in China
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 ...
Working Paper
What is Measured in National Accounts?
Most statistical agencies construct sectoral real GDP using double deflation and base period prices. When the base period price used for intermediate inputs is not equal to their marginal revenue product, such as when firms apply a markup, real GDP fluctuations become mechanically linked to variations in intermediate inputs. This is because these inputs generate profits that are incorporated into real value added. Taking this channel into account, we demonstrate that real GDP reported in national accounts substantially diverges from a theory-consistent "physical" value added. This, in turn, ...
Working Paper
A Theory of Falling Growth and Rising Rents
Growth has fallen in the U.S. amid a rise in firm concentration. Market share has shifted to low labor share firms, while within-firm labor shares have actually risen. We propose a theory linking these trends in which the driving force is falling overhead costs of spanning multiple products or a rising efficiency advantage of large firms. In response, the most efficient firms (with higher markups) spread into new product lines, thereby increasing concentration and generating a temporary burst of growth. Eventually, due to greater competition from efficient firms, within-firm markups and ...
Working Paper
Oil prices and the global economy: is it different this time around?
The recent plunge in oil prices has brought into question the generally accepted view that lower oil prices are good for the US and the global economy. In this paper, using a quarterly multi-country econometric model, we first show that a fall in oil prices tends relatively quickly to lower interest rates and inflation in most countries, and increase global real equity prices. The effects on real output are positive, although they take longer to materialize (around 4 quarters after the shock). We then re-examine the effects of low oil prices on the US economy over different sub-periods using ...
Working Paper
Long-Term Macroeconomic Effects of Climate Change: A Cross-Country Analysis
We study the long-term impact of climate change on economic activity across countries, using a stochastic growth model where labor productivity is affected by country-specific climate variables?defined as deviations of temperature and precipitation from their historical norms. Using a panel data set of 174 countries over the years 1960 to 2014, we find that per-capita real output growth is adversely affected by persistent changes in the temperature above or below its historical norm, but we do not obtain any statistically significant effects for changes in precipitation. Our counterfactual ...
Working Paper
The Outlook for U.S. Labor-Quality Growth
Over the past 15 years, labor-quality growth has been very strong?defying nearly all earlier projections?and has added around 0.5 percentage points to an otherwise modest U.S. productivity picture. Going forward, labor quality is likely to add considerably less and may even be a drag on productivity growth in the medium term. Using a variety of methods, we project that potential labor-quality growth in the longer run (7 to 10 years out) is likely to fall in the range of 0.1 to 0.25 percent per year. In the medium term, labor-quality growth could be lower or even negative, should employment ...
Report
Tracking the new economy: using growth theory to detect changes in trend productivity
The acceleration of productivity since 1995 has prompted a debate over whether the economy's underlying growth rate will remain high. In this paper, we propose a methodology for estimating trend growth that draws on growth theory to identify variables other than productivity namely consumption and labor compensation to help estimate trend productivity growth. We treat that trend as a common factor with two "regimes," high-growth and low-growth. Our analysis picks up striking evidence of a switch in the mid-1990s to a higher long-term growth regime, as well as a switch in the early 1970s in ...
Working Paper
Productivity Slowdown: Reducing the Measure of Our Ignorance
Growth accounting suggests that the bulk of the post-2004 slowdown in output growth in the U.S. is attributed to a residual called TFP. In this paper we provide a tractable accounting framework with firm heterogeneity to link this residual to innovations, markup dispersion, and potential measurement errors. Theories of creative destruction offer rich testable predictions of how the quality upgrading of products, the process efficiency of different firms, and markup dispersion in the market interact and therefore constitute a key approach to shed light on the slowdown in TFP growth. Surveying ...