Procyclical Productivity: Increasing Returns or Cyclical Utilization?
Abstract
This paper investigates the relative importance of cyclical fluctuations in labor and capital utilization, increasing returns to scale, and technology shocks as explanations for procyclical productivity. It exploits the intuition that materials inputs do not have variable utilization rates, and materials are likely to be used in fixed proportions with value added. Therefore, materials growth is a good measure of unobserved changes in capital and labor utilization. Using this measure shows that cyclical factor utilization is very important, returns to scale are about constant, and technology shocks are small and have low correlation with either output or hours growth. Copyright 1996, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Download Info
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Bibliographic Info
Article provided by MIT Press in its journal Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Volume (Year): 111 (1996)
Issue (Month): 3 (August)
Pages: 719-51
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Web page: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/
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Web: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journal-home.tcl?issn=00335533
Related research
Keywords:Other versions of this item:
- Susanto Basu, 1999. "Procyclical Productivity: Increasing Returns or Cyclical Utilization?," NBER Working Papers 5336, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
- E2 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment
- E3 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles
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