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Discussion Paper
Low Productivity Growth: The Capital Formation Link
A major economic concern is the ongoing sluggishness in the growth of output per worker hour, generally called labor productivity. In an arithmetic sense, the growth of the economy can be accounted for by the increase in hours worked plus that of labor productivity. With the unemployment rate now at a level widely regarded as near ?full employment,? growth in hours worked is likely to be limited by demographic forces, most importantly the very limited expansion of the working-age population. If productivity growth also remains low, the sustainable pace of increase of real GDP will be limited ...
Working Paper
Does Disappointing European Productivity Growth Reflect a Slowing Trend? Weighing the Evidence and Assessing the Future
In the years since the Great Recession, many observers have highlighted the slow pace of labor and total factor productivity (TFP) growth in advanced economies. This paper focuses on the European experience, where we highlight that trend TFP growth was already low in the runup to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). This suggests that it is important to consider factors other than just the deep crisis itself or policy changes since the crisis. After the mid-1990s, European economies stopped converging, or even began diverging, from the U.S. level of TFP. That said, in contrast to the United ...
Working Paper
The UK Productivity “Puzzle” in an International Comparative Perspective
The UK’s slow productivity growth since 2007 has been referred to as a “puzzle”, as if it were a particularly UK-specific challenge. In this paper, we highlight how the United States and northern Europe experienced very similar slowdowns. The common slowdown in productivity growth was a slowdown in total factor productivity (TFP) growth; we find little evidence that capital deepening was an important independent factor. From a conditional-convergence perspective, most of the UK slowdown follows from the slowdown at the U.S. frontier. From the mid-1980s to 2007, the UK’s relative ...
Speech
The U.S. economic outlook and the implications for monetary policy: remarks at the ABNY breakfast with William C. Dudley, the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City
Remarks at the ABNY breakfast with William C. Dudley, the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City.
Working Paper
A Novel MIMIC-Style Model of European Bank Technical Efficiency and Productivity Growth
Using Bayesian Monte Carlo methods, we augment a stochastic distance function measure of bank efficiency and productivity growth with indicators of capitalization, return and risk. Our novel Multiple Indicator-Multiple Cause (MIMIC) style model generates more precise estimates of policy relevant parameters such as returns to scale, technical inefficiency and productivity growth. We find considerable variation in the performance of EU-15 banks over the period 2008 to 2015. For the vast majority of banks, productivity growth – the sum of efficiency and technical changes – is negative, ...
Discussion Paper
Discretionary Services Spending Has Finally Made It Back (to 2007)
The current economic expansion is now the third-longest expansion in U.S. history (based on National Bureau of Economic Research [NBER] dating of U.S. business cycles). Even so, average growth in this expansion—a 2.1 percent annual rate—has been extraordinarily weak. In this post, I return to previous analysis on a specific portion of consumer spending—household discretionary services expenditures—that has displayed unusual weakness in the current expansion (see this post for the definition of discretionary versus nondiscretionary services expenditures, and these posts from 2012 and ...
Journal Article
What’s Happening to Productivity Growth?
President's Message: What?s Happening to Productivity Growth?
Journal Article
Understanding Patterns in U.S. Regional Economic Growth
An analysis examines how differences in productivity growth and shifting preferences for amenities generate regional variations in U.S. economic growth.
Working Paper
The Productivity Slowdown in Advanced Economies: Common Shocks or Common Trends?
This paper reviews advanced-economy productivity developments in recent decades. We focus primarily on the facts about, and explanations for, the mid-2000s labor-productivity slowdown in large European countries and the United States. Slower total factor productivity growth was the proximate cause of the slowdown. This conclusion is robust to measurement challenges including the role of intangible assets, rankings of productivity levels, and data revisions. We contrast two main narratives for the stagnating productivity frontier: The shock of the Global Financial Crisis; and a common slowdown ...
Journal Article
Historical Patterns around Financial Crises
Long-run historical data for advanced economies provide evidence to help policymakers understand specific conditions that typically lead up to financial crises. Recent research finds that rapid growth in the top income share and prolonged low labor productivity growth are robust predictors of crises. Moreover, if crises are preceded by these developments, then the subsequent recoveries are slower. This recent empirical evidence suggests that financial crises are not simply random events but are typically preceded by a prolonged buildup of macrofinancial imbalances.