U.S. labor and total-factor productivity growth slowed prior to the Great Recession. The timing rules out explanations that focus on disruptions during or since the recession, and industry and state data rule out "bubble economy" stories related to housing or finance. The slowdown is located in...

We argue that unmeasured investments in intangible organizational capital associated with the role of information and communications technology (ICT) as a general purpose technology' can explain the divergent U.S. and U.K. TFP performance after 1995. GPT stories suggest that measured TFP should...

Over the past 15 years, labor-quality growth has been very strong--defying nearly all earlier projections--and has added around 0.5 percentage points to an otherwise modest U.S. productivity picture. Going forward, labor quality is likely to add considerably less and may even be a drag on...

Modern growth theory suggests that more than 3/4 of growth since 1950 reflects rising educational attainment and research intensity. As these transition dynamics fade, U.S. economic growth is likely to slow at some point. However, the rise of China, India, and other emerging economies may allow...

This paper addresses the proper measurement of financial service output that is not priced explicitly. It shows how to impute nominal service output from financial intermediaries' interest income, and how to construct price indices for those financial services. We model financial intermediaries...

Measured productivity growth increased substantially during the second half of the 1990s. This paper examines whether this increase owes to an increase in the rate of technological change or whether it can be explained by non-technological factors relating to factor utilization, factor...

Explanations of procyclical productivity play a key role in a variety of business-cycle models. Most of these models, however, explain this procyclicality within a representative-firm paradigm. This procedure is misleading. We decompose aggregate productivity changes into several terms, each of...

Using data on gross output for two-digit manufacturing industries, we find that an increase in the output of one manufacturing sector has little or no significant effect on the productivity of other sectors. Using value-added data, however, we confirm the results of previous studies which find...

U.S. output has expanded only slowly since the recession trough in 2009, even though the unemployment rate has essentially returned to a pre-crisis, normal level. We use a growth-accounting decomposition to explore explanations for the output shortfall, giving full treatment to cyclical effects...

Yes. We construct a measure of aggregate technology change, controlling for varying utilization of capital and labor, non-constant returns and imperfect competition, and aggregation effects. On impact, when technology improves, input use and non-residential investment fall sharply. Output...