Search Results
Newsletter
Concentrated Growth: The Role of the IT Sector
Productivity is the engine of economic growth and a key factor in determining standards of living and economic well-being. In this article, we study the distribution of total factor productivity (TFP) growth across sectors of the U.S. economy—i.e., the composition of TFP growth—and demonstrate that over approximately the past four decades, U.S. TFP growth has been highly concentrated, with the information technology (IT) sector in particular playing a large and outsized role.
Report
Spatial Wage Gaps and Frictional Labor Markets
We develop a job-ladder model with labor reallocation across firms and space, which we design to leverage matched employer-employee data to study differences in wages and labor productivity across regions. We apply our framework to data from Germany: twenty-five years after the reunification, real wages in the East are still 26 percent lower than those in the West. We find that 60 percent of the wage gap is due to labor being paid a higher wage per efficiency unit in West Germany, and quantify three distinct barriers that prevent East Germans from migrating west to obtain a higher wage: ...