Tag Archives: Productivity

Acquisitions, Productivity, and Profitability: Evidence from the Japanese Cotton Spinning Industry

Posted on September 11, 2014 by ozidar

From Serguey Braguinsky, Atsushi Ohyama, Tetsuji Okazaki, Chad Syverson: We explore how changes in ownership and managerial control affect the productivity and profitability of producers. Using detailed operational, financial, and ownership data from the Japanese cotton spinning industry at the turn of the last … Continue reading →

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Linkages and Economic Development

Posted on June 23, 2014 by ozidar

From Dominick Bartelme and Yuriy Gorodnichenko: Specialization is a powerful source of productivity gains but how production net- works at the industry level are related to aggregate productivity in the data is an open question. We construct a database of input-output … Continue reading →

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Structural Transformation, the Mismeasurement of Productivity Growth, and the Cost Disease of Services

Posted on April 9, 2014 by ozidar

From Alywn Young: If workers self-select into industries based upon their relative productivity in different tasks, and comparative advantage is aligned with absolute advantage, then the average efficacy of a sector’ s workforce will be negatively correlated with its employment … Continue reading →

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Inequality and Technological Change: The Skill Complementarity of Broadband Internet

Posted on February 18, 2014 by ozidar

A very interesting paper from Anders Akerman, Ingvil Gaarder, Magne Mogstad: Does adoption of broadband internet in firms enhance labor productivity and increase wages? And is this technological change skill biased or factor neutral? We exploit rich Norwegian data with firm-level information on … Continue reading →

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Private Equity, Productivity, and Inequality

Posted on February 11, 2014 by ozidar

Sorry for the light posting – I have been traveling for job interviews. Here’s an interesting paper that I heard about recently. It shows that  private equity buyouts bring productivity improvements and lower payrolls on average. Here is the full … Continue reading →

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The Decline of the U.S. Rust Belt: A Macroeconomic Analysis

Posted on November 11, 2013 by ozidar

From Simeon Alder, David Lagakos , Lee Ohanian: No region of the United States fared worse over the post-war period than the “Rust Belt,” the heavy manufacturing zone bordering the Great Lakes. We argue that a lack of competition in labor and output … Continue reading →

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The Benefits of High Productivity

Posted on November 1, 2013 by ozidar

Higher productivity lowers effective labor costs and makes the US a more attractive place for businesses to locate. This idea is important to keep in mind when thinking about the President’s push for more FDI and (productivity enhancing) infrastructure investment. … Continue reading →

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Technological Change through History: the View from 30,000 feet

Posted on October 21, 2013 by ozidar

Brad Delong has a an outstanding post on technological change. He categorizes how people add value and shows how technological change alters these categories. It’s interesting to think about his post and these issues in terms of a simple (classical) model and … Continue reading →

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The Impact of Regional and Sectoral Productivity Changes on the U.S. Economy

Posted on October 2, 2013 by ozidar

From Lorenzo Caliendo, Fernando Parro, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, and Pierre-Daniel Sarte: We study the impact of regional and sectoral productivity changes on the U.S. economy. To that end, we consider an environment that captures the effects of interregional and intersectoral trade in propagating … Continue reading →

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Macroeconomic Implications of Agglomeration

Posted on September 5, 2013 by ozidar

From Morris Davis, Jonas Fisher, and Toni Whited: Cities exist because of the productivity gains that arise from clustering production and workers, a process called agglomeration. How important is agglomeration for aggregate growth? This paper constructs a dynamic stochastic general … Continue reading →

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