Advanced economies have been witnessing a pronounced slowdown of productivity growth since the global financial crisis that is accompanied in recent years by a withdrawal from trade integration processes. We study the determinants of productivity slowdown over the past two decades in four...

There is no consensus on how strongly the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) has stimulated U.S. private fixed investment. Some argue that the business tax provisions spurred investment by cutting the cost of capital. Others see the TCJA primarily as a windfall for shareholders. We find that U.S....

The recovery of private investment in Italy has lagged its euro area peers over the past decade. This paper examines the role of elevated labor costs in hindering the recovery. Specifically, labor costs rose faster than labor productivity prior to the global financial crisis and have remained...

U.S. business investment has taken a serious toll during the global financial crisis and also in the recovery phase investment did not pick up as expected. What is surprising is that the alleged investment slowdown happened at a time of record corporate profits and retained earnings, highly...

In the 1980s, U.S. real investment in high technology equipment has grown rapidly while other components of business fixed investment have been weak. The surge in real high technology investment has been accompanied by a very sharp decline in its relative price, leading to difficult index number...

The increase in the U.S. public debt over the past twelve years raises questions about its implications for investment and economic growth. This paper places these developments within an international and historical context and quantitatively examines the implications of various measures of the...

This paper examines the behavior of business fixed investment in the United States in the 1980s. A background discussion of the long-term behavior of the components of business fixed investment is provided, setting the context for the empirical analysis. A standard neoclassical model of business...

While expanding public investment can help filling infrastructure bottlenecks, scaling up too much and too fast often leads to inefficient outcomes. This paper rationalizes this outcome looking at the association between cost inflation and public investment in a large sample of road construction...

Italy's labor productivity in market services has declined since 2000, underperforming manufacturing and peer European countries, especially in strongly regulated sectors. A model of monopolistic competition is used to identify which service sectors would benefit more from removing entry and/or...