IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/econom/v66y1999i264p533-550.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Procyclical Labour Productivity: A Closer Look at a Stylized Fact

Author

Listed:
  • Robert A. Hart
  • James R. Malley

Abstract

At 4‐digit United States manufacturing industry level, we find evidence suggesting that the stylized fact of procyclical labour productivity should be treated with great caution. We use the NBER Manufacturing Productivity database to investigate the relationship between hourly labour productivity and real output for 450 industries for the years 1958–91. Labour productivity is significantly procyclical in 63% of industries and acyclical in 36%. In the latter respect, a high proportion of investment goods industries display acyclical productivity. Cross‐section regressions are carried out that seek to explain the interindustry distribution of cyclicality. The analysis attributes a significant role to variations in materials costs, as a proxy for fluctuations in factor utilization.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert A. Hart & James R. Malley, 1999. "Procyclical Labour Productivity: A Closer Look at a Stylized Fact," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 66(264), pages 533-550, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:econom:v:66:y:1999:i:264:p:533-550
    DOI: 10.1111/1468-0335.00187
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0335.00187
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/1468-0335.00187?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Robert A Hart, 2022. "Labour productivity during the Great Depression and the Great Recession in UK engineering and metal manufacture [The Productivity Puzzle: a Firm-level Investigation into Employment Behaviour and Re," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 74(2), pages 431-452.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:econom:v:66:y:1999:i:264:p:533-550. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.