Does capacity utilisation help estimating the TFP cycle?

In the production function approach, accurate output gap assessment requires a careful evaluation of the TFP cycle. In this paper we propose a bivariate model that links TFP to capacity utilization and we show that this model improves the TFP trend-cycle decomposition upon univariate and Hodrick-Prescott filtering. In particular, we show that estimates of the TFP cycle that load information about capacity utilization are less revised than univariate and HP estimates, both with 2009 and real-time TFP data vintages. We obtain this evidence for twelve preenlargement EU countries.