Why is productivity procyclical? Why do we care?

Productivity rises in booms and falls in recessions. There are four main explanations for this procyclical productivity: (i) procyclical technology shocks, (ii) widespread imperfect competition and increasing returns, (iii) variable utilization of inputs over the cycle, and (iv) resource reallocations. Recent macroeconomic literature views this stylized fact of procyclical productivity as an essential feature of business cycles because each explanation has important implications for macroeconomic modeling. In this paper, we discuss empirical methods for assessing the importance of these four explanations. We provide microfoundations for our preferred approach of estimating an explicitly first-order approximation to the production function, using a theoretically motivated proxy for utilization. When we implement this approach, we find that variable utilization and resource reallocations are particularly important in explaining procyclical productivity. We also argue that the reallocation effects that we identify are not "biases" -- they reflect changes in an economy’s ability to produce goods and services for final consumption from given primary inputs of capital and labor. Thus, from a normative viewpoint, reallocations are significant for welfare; from a positive viewpoint, they constitute potentially important amplification and propagation mechanisms for macroeconomic modeling.Productivity ; Business cycles

A Theory of the Reform of Bureaucratic Institutions

By bureaucratic institutions or bureaucracy, we mean the rules and regulations that are implemented by government agencies. Burdensome bureaucratic institutions are leading obstacles to economic development and therefore the target of economic reform of many countries in today's world. In this paper, we provide a theoretical framework to analyze the reform of bureaucratic institutions. The analysis shows the key to the reform is to properly incentivize the incumbent generation of bureaucrats, whose cooperation is needed to reform the bureaucracy. However, a simple buy out strategy of reform may not always work. Under certain conditions, a delegation strategy that grants incumbent bureaucrats the decision rights to initiate and to reap the benefit of reform can be successful.

Aggregate Productivity and the Productivity of Aggregates

Explanations of procyclical productivity play a key role in a variety of business-cycle models. Most of these models, however, explain this procyclicality within a representative-firm paradigm. This procedure is misleading. We decompose aggregate productivity changes into several terms, each of which has an economic interpretation. However, many of these terms measure composition effects such as reallocations of inputs across productive units. We apply this decomposition to U.S. data by aggregating from roughly the two-digit level to the private economy. We find that the compositional terms are significantly procyclical. Controlling for these terms virtually eliminates the evidence for increasing returns to scale, and implies that input growth is uncorrelated with technology change.

Intermediate Goods and Business Cycles: Implications for Productivity and Welfare

This paper studies a business-cycle model with imperfect competition where intermediate goods are used in production. It is an example of a class of models in which markups are countercyclical. One major result is that in this setting, demand-driven output movements cause productivity to be procyclical. The paper studies a number of theoretical and empirical implications of this source of productivity fluctuations. In a subset of models, countercyclical markups result from assuming that there are fixed costs of changing nominal prices. The paper shows that modeling the use of intermediate goods in this type of model greatly expands the extent of price rigidity, leading to larger welfare losses from business cycles.Center for Research on Economic and Social Theory, Department of Economics, University of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100987/1/ECON042.pd

Procyclical Productivity: Overhead Inputs or Cyclical Utilization?

It has long been argued that cyclical fluctuations in labor and capital utilization and overhead labor and capital are important for explaining procyclical productivity. Her I present two simple and direct tests of these hypotheses, and a way of measuring the relative importance of these two explanations. The intuition behind the paper is that materials input is likely to be measured with less cyclical error than labor and capital input, and materials are likely to be used in strict proportion to value added. In that case, materials growth provides a good measure of the unobserved changes in capital and labor input. I find that labor hoarding and cyclical capital utilization are quanititatively significant: the true growth of variable labor and capital inputs is, on average, almost twice the measured change in the capital stock or labor hours. More than half of that is caused by the presence of overhead inputs in production; the rest is due to cyclical factor utilization.Center for Research on Economic and Social Theory, Department of Economics, University of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100998/1/ECON043.pd

Are technology improvements contractionary?

Yes. We construct a measure of aggregate technology change, controlling for varying utilization of capital and labor, non- constant returns and imperfect competition, and aggregation effects. On impact, when technology improves, input use and non- residential investment fall sharply. Output changes little. With a lag of several years, inputs and investment return to normal and output rises strongly. We discuss what models could be consistent with this evidence. For example, standard one-sector real-business-cycle models are not, since they generally predict that technology improvements are expansionary, with inputs and (especially) output rising immediately. However, the evidence is consistent with simple sticky-price models, which predict the results we find: When technology improves, input use and investment demand generally fall in the short run, and output itself may also fall.Technology - Economic aspects

Are Technology Improvements Contractionary?

Yes. We construct a measure of aggregate technology change, controlling for imperfect competition, varying utilization of capital and labor, and aggregation effects. On impact, when technology improves, input use falls sharply, and output may fall slightly. With a lag of several years, inputs return to normal and output rises strongly. We discuss what models could be consistent with this evidence. For example, standard one-sector real-business-cycle models are not, since they generally predict that technology improvements are expansionary, with inputs and (especially) output rising immediately. However, the evidence is consistent with simple sticky-price models, which predict the results we find: When technology improves, input use generally falls in the short run, and output itself may also fall.

Procyclical Productivity: Increasing Returns or Cyclical Utilization?

It has long been argued that cyclical fluctuations in labor and capital utilization and the presence of overhead labor and capital are important for explaining procyclical productivity. Here I present two simple and direct tests of these hypotheses, and a way of measuring the relative importance of these two explanations. The intuition behind the paper is that materials input is likely to be measured with less cyclical error than labor and capital input, and materials are likely to be used in strict proportion to value added. In that case, materials growth provides a good measure of the unobserved changes in capital and labor input. Using this measure, I find that the true growth of variable labor and capital inputs is, on average, almost twice the measured change in the capital stock or labor hours. More than half of that is caused by the presence of overhead inputs in production; the rest is due to cyclical factor utilization.