Labor Productivity: Structural Change and Cyclical Dynamics
May 1998
Working Paper Number:
CES-98-07
Abstract
A longstanding issue in empirical economics is the behavior of average labor productivity over the business cycle. This paper provides new insights into the cyclicality of aggregate productivity at the plant level as well as the role of reallocation across plants over the cycle. We find that plant-level productivity is even more procyclical than aggregate productivity because short-run reallocation yields a countercyclical contribution to labor productivity. At the plant level we find the cyclicality of productivity varies systematically with long-run employment growth. Over the course of the cycle, plants that are long-run downsizers exhibit significantly greater procyclicality of productivity than long-run upsizers. When we control for the direction of a cyclical shock, we find that the fall in productivity from an adverse magnitude than the fall in productivity from an equivalent adverse cyclical shock for long-run upsizers. We argue that these findings raise questions about one of the most popular explanations or procyclical productivity: changing factor utilization over the cycle.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Labor Productivity: Structural Change and Cyclical Dynamics' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperThe U.S. Manufacturing Sector's Response to Higher Electricity Prices: Evidence from State-Level Renewable Portfolio Standards
October 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-47
While several papers examine the effects of renewable portfolio standards (RPS) on electricity prices, they mainly rely on state-level data and there has been little research on how RPS policies affect manufacturing activity via their effect on electricity prices. Using plant-level data for the entire U.S. manufacturing sector and all electric utilities from 1992 ' 2015, we jointly estimate the effect of RPS adoption and stringency on plant-level electricity prices and production decisions. To ensure that our results are not sensitive to possible pre-existing differences across manufacturing plants in RPS and non-RPS states, we implement coarsened exact covariate matching. Our results suggest that electricity prices for plants in RPS states averaged about 2% higher than in non-RPS states, notably lower than prior estimates based on state-level data. In response to these higher electricity prices, we estimate that plant electricity usage declined by 1.2% for all plants and 1.8% for energy-intensive plants, broadly consistent with published estimates of the elasticity of electricity demand for industrial users. We find smaller declines in output, employment, and hours worked (relative to the decline in electricity use). Finally, several key RPS policy design features that vary substantially from state-to-state produce heterogeneous effects on plant-level electricity prices.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEntry Costs Rise with Growth
October 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-63
Over time and across states in the U.S., the number of firms is more closely tied to overall employment than to output per worker. In many models of firm dynamics, trade, and growth with a free entry condition, these facts imply that the costs of creating a new firm increase sharply with productivity growth. This increase in entry costs can stem from the rising cost of labor used in entry and weak or negative knowledge spillovers from prior entry. Our findings suggest that productivity-enhancing policies will not induce firm entry, thereby limiting the total impact of such policies on welfare.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperHOW IMPORTANT ARE SECTORAL SHOCKS
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-31
I quantify the contribution of sectoral shocks to business cycle fluctuations in aggregate output. I develop a multi-industry general equilibrium model in which each industry employs the material and capital goods produced by other sectors, and then estimate this model using data on U.S. industries sales, output prices, and input choices. Maximum likelihood estimates indicate that industry-specific shocks account for nearly two-thirds of the volatility of aggregate output, substantially larger than previously assessed. Identification of the relative importance of industry-specific shocks comes primarily from data on industries intermediate input purchases, data that earlier estimations of multi-industry models have ignored.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperWho's Most Exposed to International Shocks? Estimating Differences in Import Price Sensitivity across U.S. Demographic Groups
March 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-13R
Differences in consumption patterns across demographic groups mean that international price shocks differentially affect such groups. We construct import price indexes for U.S. households that vary by age, race, marital status, education, and urban status. Black households and urban households experienced significantly higher import price inflation from 1996-2018 compared to other groups, such as white households and rural households. Sensitivity to international price shocks varies widely, implying movements in exchange rates and foreign prices, both during our sample and during the Covid-19 pandemic, drove sizable differences in import price inflation ' and total inflation ' across households.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperINTRA-FIRM TRADE AND PRODUCT CONTRACTIBILITY
March 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-12
This paper examines the determinants of intra-firm trade in U.S. imports using detailed country-product data. We create a new measure of product contractibility based on the degree of intermediation in international trade for the product. We find important roles for the interaction of country and product characteristics in determining intra-firm trade shares. Intra- firm trade is high for products with low levels of contractibility sourced from countries with weak governance, for skill-intensive products from skill-scarce countries, and for capital-intensive products from capital-abundant countries.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Effect of Oil News Shocks on Job Creation and Destruction
January 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-06
Using data from the Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM) and the Census of Manufacturing (CMF), we construct quarterly measures of job creation and destruction by 3-digit NAICS industries spanning from 1980Q3-2016Q4. These long series allow us to address three questions regarding the effect of oil news shocks. What is the average effect of oil news shocks on sectoral labor reallocation? What characteristics explain the observed heterogeneity in the average responses across industries? Has the response of US manufacturing changed over time? We find evidence that oil news shocks exert only a moderate effect on total manufacturing net employment growth but lead to a significant increase in job reallocation. However, we find a high degree of heterogeneity in responses across industries. We then show that the cross-industry variation in the sensitivity of net employment growth and excess job reallocation to oil news shocks is related to differences in energy costs, the rate of energy to capital expenditures, and the share of mature firms in the industry. Finally, we illustrate how the dynamic response of sectoral job creation and destruction to oil news shocks has declined since the mid-2000s.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDistribution Preserving Statistical Disclosure Limitation
September 2006
Working Paper Number:
tp-2006-04
One approach to limiting disclosure risk in public-use microdata is to release multiply-imputed, partially synthetic data sets. These are data on actual respondents, but with confidential data replaced by multiply-imputed synthetic values. A mis-specified imputation model can invalidate inferences because the distribution of synthetic data is completely determined by the model used to generate them. We present two practical methods of generating synthetic values when the imputer has only limited information about the true data generating process. One is applicable when the true likelihood is known up to a monotone transformation. The second requires only limited knowledge of the true likelihood, but nevertheless preserves the conditional distribution of the confidential data, up to sampling error, on arbitrary subdomains. Our method maximizes data utility and minimizes incremental disclosure risk up to posterior uncertainty in the imputation model and sampling error in the estimated transformation. We validate the approach with a simulation and application to a large linked employer-employee database.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEstimating Unequal Gains across U.S. Consumers with Supplier Trade Data
January 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-04
Using supplier-level trade data, we estimate the effect on consumer welfare from changes in U.S. imports both in the aggregate and for different household income groups from 1998 to 2014. To do this, we use consumer preferences which feature non-homotheticity both within sectors and across sectors. After structurally estimating the parameters of the model, using the universe of U.S. goods imports, we construct import price indexes in which a variety is defined as a foreign establishment producing an HS10 product that is exported to the United States. We find that lower income households experienced the most import price inflation, while higher income households experienced the least import price inflation during our time period. Thus, we do not find evidence that the consumption channel has mitigated the distributional effects of trade that have occurred through the nominal income channel in the United States over the past two decades.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperExport Performance and State Industrial Growth
January 1990
Working Paper Number:
CES-90-03
This research examines whether state industrial growth over the past decade has occurred independently of changes in manufacturing exports and whether export employment growth responds to the same economic and locational forces as employment growth in domestic production. The empirical results indicate that employment and value added growth are not independent of export sales growth; however, a shift toward export markets is not strongly associated with higher manufacturing growth rates. Traditional factors account for a far greater proportion of the variation in domestic than export employment growth. The results suggest the need for additional research on the sources of state comparative advantage in export markets.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperOutput Market Power and Spatial Misallocation
November 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-57
Most product industries are local. In the U.S., firms selling goods and services to local consumers account for half of total sales and generate more than sixty percent of the nation's jobs. Competition in these industries occurs in local product markets: cities. I propose a theory of such competition in which firms have output market power. Spatial differences in local competition arise endogenously due to the spatial sorting of heterogeneous firms. The ability to charge higher markups induces more productive firms to overvalue locating in larger cities, leading to a misallocation of firms across space. The optimal policy incen tivizes productive firms to relocate to smaller cities, providing a rationale for commonly used place-based policies. I use U.S. Census establishment-level data to estimate markups and to structurally estimate the model. I document a significant heterogeneity in markups for local industries across U.S. cities. Cities in the top decile of the city-size distribution have a fifty percent lower markup than cities in the bottom decile. I use the estimated model to quantify the general equilibrium effects of place-based policies. Policies that remove markups and relocate firms to smaller cities yield sizable aggregate welfare gains.View Full Paper PDF
