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Journal Article
Productivity in the Twelfth District
Working Paper
Quantifying 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
Is embodied technology the result of upstream R&D? industry-level evidence
In this paper, I develop an industry-level index of capital-embodied R&D by capturing the extent of research and development directed at the capital goods in which a given industry invests. Compiling and adjusting data from the National Science Foundation and Commerce Department, I construct industry-level, time-series measures of this index and investigate its properties. The data allow me to identify the R&D directed at the development of specific types of capital rather than incorrectly assuming industry R&D spending is equivalent to R&D directed at the industry's product, an assumption ...
Journal Article
Where Is the U.S. COVID-19 Pandemic Headed?
Consumer spending and business operations across the United States have been highly dependent on local conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Current economic forecasts therefore must incorporate projections for where the pandemic is headed. A new econometric model provides county-level and national forecasts of COVID-19 infections. Estimates from the model indicate that population immunity acquired from prior infections is the primary driver of recent declines in new cases. This factor should continue to exert strong downward pressure on new cases in the weeks ahead.
Journal Article
The puzzle of weak first-quarter GDP growth
The official estimate of real GDP growth for the first three months of 2015 was shockingly weak. However, such estimates in the past appear to have understated first-quarter growth fairly consistently, even though they are adjusted to try to account for seasonal patterns. Applying a second round of seasonal adjustment corrects this residual seasonality. After this correction, aggregate output grew much faster in the first quarter than reported.
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
State Incentives for Innovation, Star Scientists and Jobs: Evidence from Biotech
We evaluate the effects of state-provided financial incentives for biotech companies, which are part of a growing trend of placed-based policies designed to spur innovation clusters. We estimate that the adoption of subsidies for biotech employers by a state raises the number of star biotech scientists in that state by about 15 percent over a three year period. A 10% decline in the user cost of capital induced by an increase in R&D tax incentives raises the number of stars by 22%. Most of the gains are due to the relocation of star scientist to adopting states, with limited effect on the ...
Working Paper
Roads to prosperity or bridges to nowhere? theory and evidence on the impact of public infrastructure investment
We examine the dynamic macroeconomic effects of public infrastructure investment both theoretically and empirically, using a novel data set we compiled on various highway spending measures. Relying on the institutional design of federal grant distributions among states, we construct a measure of government highway spending shocks that captures revisions in expectations about future government investment. We find that shocks to federal highway funding has a positive effect on local GDP both on impact and after 6 to 8 years, with the impact effect coming from shocks during (local) recessions. ...
Working Paper
A state level database for the manufacturing sector: construction and sources
This document describes the construction of and data sources for a state-level panel data set measuring output and factor use for the manufacturing sector. These data are a subset of a larger, comprehensive data set that we currently are constructing and hope to post on the FRBSF website in the near future. The comprehensive data set will cover the U.S. manufacturing sector and may be thought of as a state-level analog to other widely used productivity data sets such as the industry-level NBER Productivity Database or Dale Jorgenson?s ?KLEM? database or the country-level Penn World Tables, ...
Working Paper
Clearing the Fog: The Predictive Power of Weather for Employment Reports and their Asset Price Responses
This paper exploits vast granular data – with over one million county-month observations – to estimate a dynamic panel data model of weather’s local employment effects. The fitted county model is then aggregated and used to generate in-sample and rolling out-of-sample (“nowcast”) estimates of the weather effect on national monthly employment. These nowcasts, which use only employment and weather data available prior to a given employment report, are significantly predictive not only of the surprise component of employment reports but also of stock and bond market returns on the days ...