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What Does It Take to Explain Procyclical Productivity?
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Yi Wen
Published/Copyright:
June 23, 2004
Abstract
Labor productivity comoves strongly with output, leads output and employment, and is only weakly correlated with employment. Procyclical productivity is observed in virtually all countries and industries, and it is observed even in periods of fluctuations due to pure demand shocks, such as during the Great Depression and the second World War. This paper shows that a standard RBC model driven by demand shocks alone is able to explain procyclical productivity without the need to resort to technology shocks or increasing returns to scale. The key element is labor hoarding due to adjustment cost of labor. It is also shown that the observed cross-country differences in productivity cycles can be rationalized by a single parameter alone - the size of the adjustment cost of labor.
Keywords: PRODUCTIVITY; DEMAND SHOCKS; REAL-BUSINESS-CYCLE; LABOR HOARDING; CAPACITY UTILIZATION; ADJUSTMENT COST
Published Online: 2004-06-23
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Keywords for this article
PRODUCTIVITY;
DEMAND SHOCKS;
REAL-BUSINESS-CYCLE;
LABOR HOARDING;
CAPACITY UTILIZATION;
ADJUSTMENT COST
Articles in the same Issue
- Advances Article
- Price Stability and Monetary Policy Effectiveness when Nominal Interest Rates are Bounded at Zero
- Contributions Article
- Aggregate Price Changes and Dispersion: A Comparison of the Equity and Goods and Services Markets
- Dissemination of Technology in Market and Planned Economies
- Interest-Rate Smoothing: Monetary Policy Inertia or Unobserved Variables?
- Is the U.S. Aggregate Production Function Cobb-Douglas? New Estimates of the Elasticity of Substitution
- What Does It Take to Explain Procyclical Productivity?
- Endogenous Distribution, Politics, and the Growth-Equity Tradeoff
- Explaining Speculative Expansions
- Tariffs, Entry Regulation and Markups: Country Size Matters
- Schumpeterian Growth, North-South Trade and Wage Rigidity
- Do Federal Reserve Policy Surprises Reveal Superior Information about the Economy?
- Bailouts and Bank Runs in a Model of Crony Capitalism
- Multiple Equilibria in Heterogeneous Expectations Models
- Topics Article
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- Do Minimum Wages Raise the NAIRU?
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- Creative Destruction and Policy in a Model of Endogenous Growth
- Intergenerational Habits, Fiscal Policy, and Welfare
- Output Composition of the Monetary Policy Transmission Mechanism in Japan
- Socio-Cultural Variables and Economic Success: Evidence from Italian Provinces 1951-1991
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