Questions tagged [productivity]
A measure of efficiency in production for some given set of inputs
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Is the definition of Investment variable in Economics?
I studied that Investment is the expenditure incurred on the procurement of such goods that would help us in production of goods and services.
And mainly consists of Fixed and Inventory Investment
...
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2answers
58 views
Can we see the computer age in the productivity statistics?
Robert Solow famously said:
You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics
This quote is often linked with the productivity paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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45 views
Total factor productivity and revenue
On page 116 of The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective Robert Allen writes
"...the total factor productivity of enclosed farms was 18 per cent
higher than that of open fields. If ...
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1answer
48 views
Tax system is progressive or regressive
Let´s discuss a little!
When the direct effect of a tax or transfer policy (compared to what would happen in the absence of the policy) is a reduction in inequality, it is called progressive policy. ...
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How can the number of hairdressers in the UK be up 50% since 2010?
In this recent article, The Economist argues that one of the reasons behind the anaemic recent wage growth in Britain is that the recent job growth has been concentrated in lower-productivity jobs and ...
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What's a product that historically has always had the same value, and probably will in the future?
Money usually has inflation tied to it, but is there a product that has stayed around the same value world wide for a very long time, and probably will for a very long time as well (something like 100 ...
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110 views
Empirical explanation on divergence between productivity and wages since the 70s
There is a well know graph, that shows a tight link between productivity and wages, until the 70s, and a break of the link since:
There's a lot of possible explanations for this, I keep hearing more ...
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2 firms production decision for one agent
I'm trying to solve the optimal production $\{x,y\}$ for a risk neutral agent with weight $w$ in firm $X$ and weight $1-w$ in firm $Y$. Each firm has marginal cost $c^X$ and $c^Y$ respectively. The ...
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Does credit really help an economy?
I'm reading Ray Dalio's How the Economic Machine Works, and although I understand the role of credit in an economy, I don't understand whether credit actually adds any value to an economy.
Ray says ...
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1answer
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Are slacks the same as mix-inefficiency?
On the diagram below it is stated that A' has input slacks as it could reduce the amount of $x_2$ and still be on the frontier (by moving to C). However I recall mix-inefficiency having a similar ...
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What is the rational behind the “best set of weights” under DEA?
I'm trying to learn the Charnes, Cooper, Rhodes (CCR) model for data envelopment analysis (DEA) and a key idea presented is the notion of a "best set of weights".
Whereby you are trying to find the ...
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2answers
138 views
Inclusion of firms on the efficient frontier of a Production Possibility Set
I'm working through Cooper's Data Envelopment Analysis, and they are going over Production Possibility Sets.
They present 9 firms, each with two inputs and one output:
Graphically it easy to see why ...
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58 views
GDP per Installed Computing Facilities
I would like to quantify the importance of computing power for economic aggregate output in an economy in a "simple" GDP-to-installed-CPU ratio.
The idea is to calculate a measure similar to GDP-to-...
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1answer
21 views
Productivity issue
Could someone help with the following?
Company produces products of daily demand. It employs workers In number of 12 people (HER) Wages of workers. The costs of hiring and firing are 25 per employee, ...
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1answer
120 views
What counts and don't count as rent seeking?
Rent seeking is often associated with lobbying.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp says that rent seeking is gaining wealth without "creating" wealth. Is this the only commonly used ...
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2answers
64 views
Productivity and wages in a task-based model
In a task-based model like the one developed in Acemoglu&Autor 2011 with two types of worker, can the low type have a higher wage with respect to the high type?
More specifically: if the ...
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What is a better measure of (Workers') Productivity than GDP (PPP) per hour worked?
The GDP (PPP) per hour worked is a measure of the productivity of a country when not taking into account unemployment or hours worked per week. GDP (PPP) stands for gross domestic product normalised ...
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1answer
57 views
How to improve the underperforming construction productivity by correcting its market failures?
Globally, labor-productivity growth in construction has averaged only 1 percent a year over the past two decades, compared with growth of 2.8 percent for the total world economy and 3.6 percent in the ...
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1answer
63 views
TFP estimation as residual and normality of errors
Economists normally calculate TFP as the residual of a regression on output against K, L, and maybe other variables.
However, a well behaved regression is expected residuals to be normal (https://en....
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1answer
41 views
When does a high markup mean high productivity? Never?
I was reading this article in VoxEU, where the authors (one is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University) make the case that an increasing average mark-up has accounted for much of the late ...
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2answers
120 views
Why are imported Chinese products in India cheaper than those locally produced?
Why an imported Chinese product in India is cheaper compared to a locally manufactured item?
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1answer
60 views
Why are readily available productivity data relative, not absolute?
I've been trying to do some cursory research on labor productivity. In the process, I've noticed that the readily available data in the US, as accessed through either BLS or FRED (yes, I know it's the ...
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Labour Saving vs. Labour Augmenting - what is the difference?
It seems reasonable to say that technology generally increases output per unit of labour. Therefore in any factory which has installed new technology one can reasonably expect that for the same ...
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1answer
84 views
Link between Productivity and Labour Force?
In this article from VoxEU, the author states:
By definition growth in output per capita equals growth in labour
productivity times growth in hours per capita. The slowdown in
productivity ...
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1answer
83 views
Has worker productivity decreased since the election of Donald Trump?
Anecdotally, I know that myself and others have felt distracted, depressed and anxious since the election of Donald Trump.
Are there any studies that have objectively sought to measure worker ...
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2answers
2k views
Will SRAS curve definitely shift if LRAS curve shifts?
From what I know, a shift in LRAS is generally caused by a change in maximum productive capacity of an economy, which affects the full-employment output level. Such change in maximum productive ...
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130 views
Difference between Value-Added TFP and Gross-Output TFP?
I am working with EU-KLEMS data, and I am using TFP growth as a proxy for technological change. However, there are 2 variables for TFP - TFP based on Gross Output and TFP based on Value Added.
I ...
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1answer
54 views
Government Ownership vs Private Ownership
In a debate concerning long term economic strategy, a representative of a left party was trying to support that privatisation and Small Government which minimizes its own activities is not a viable ...
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2k views
Productivity vs real earnings in the US — what happened ca 1974?
Somewhat related to the most recent US elections, I've been researching the whole "white working class" situation, and one strange anomaly has popped up.
When one looks at a graph of productivity (...
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References for estimating lifetime earnings lost due to caregiving (health economics)
I am working on a project on the productivity costs for caregivers of people with Disease X, a degenerative disease that affects mobility over time. I am looking for references, either scholarly ...
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3answers
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What are the causes of increase in productivity of labour?
This question has a specific context.
While reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, edited, with notes and marginal summary by Edwin Cannan in 1904, one comes across the following lines on the ...
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Where to start, to know the cost, in hours of work, necessary to produce one more car (or any other good)?
Let's say I want to buy a car. It costs that, so I can know that, for example, I have to work 3 months to pay for it. But does the car really needs three months of human work to be build?
What is the ...
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1answer
24 views
What are the different patterns/quantity of employment according to demands of different income ranges?
I don't really have that much knowledge on economics or anything, so perhaps that's something I'd find an answer if I just knew the adequate terminology.
Rephrasing/explaining my question: different ...
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Aggregation in heterogeneous firms models
I am reading the 2014 annual reviews article by Hopenhayn and am struggling to reach the aggregation results he states in the general case of vector of inputs (let's for simplicity assume two inputs, ...
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What are the currently accepted methods to estimate a firm's productivity?
While there are a lot of methods one can think of, like computing the ratio of profits to assets or profits to sales, apparently it is a difficult problem.
It would be useful to know how effectively ...
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Help me find sources on labor productivity in the IT economics sector
I could not find statistics on this issue. Please give me the link or the documents themselves with statistics of productivity in IT for the last 10 years
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3answers
104 views
If automation implicitly increases wealth, why is it generally considered undesirable?
When it comes to the subject of automation, I read that the wide majority of the arguments assume that the profits/savings "vanish", alongside the jobs loss.
I see the reasoning above as flawed ...
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50 views
Reducing the working hours to 32 hours / week - how much it would affect the prices of commodities?
If the working hours would be reduced from 40 hours / week to 32 hours / week (4 days x 8 hours instead of 5 days x 8 hours), but maintaining the wages at the same levels, then I guess that the price ...
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1answer
603 views
If the Number of Workers in an Economy Doubled, Would Productivity Fall to Half its Former Value?
I am assuming that the production function for the economy has constant returns to scale, and all other inputs stay the same.
These are the steps I have made to try to answer this question:
1) Y/L = ...
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1answer
355 views
Why has increased productivity over the last 100 years not affected how much people work?
If we are generally richer and more productive due to better technology and other factors, why do we still work so much?
I understand that there are various incentives to work (e.g. implicit status ...
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1answer
288 views
Under what circumstances is an increase in national output called economic growth?
An increase in output can be achieved in two basic ways.
The first scenario:
Aggregate demand increases, so supply extends. In this way the economy is making more use of its resources, but there is ...
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1answer
725 views
Is America getting to a point where there are many more people than jobs or money to go around? Are times better or worse than 50 years ago? [closed]
Is America headed to a point of too many people, not enough work? Is life for an average American better than 50 years ago? I have asked about automation in my first question. Then I've asked a ...
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3answers
142 views
Do machines reduce labor… or so they redistribute, alter, and globally increase labor?
John Stuart Mill famously remarked that labor-saving machines have not saved one minute of labor. More seriously, Marx argued, roughly, that machines can gain temporary market advantage, but cannot ...
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Has the world become poorer?
This question is not backed by serious economic research but mainly by a very simple attempt to look at how the world economy has changed.
I am asking whether and why the world has, over the past 50 ...
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How will non-rich citizens make a living if jobs keep getting replaced by robots and are outsourced?
Decades ago a factory job could support a wife and kids until retirement and they offered insurance, benefits, etc. Now, no more unions, those jobs as well as tech and customer service jobs are ...
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0answers
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How does Austrian Economics define Labour Productivity?
Is there a specific Austrian definition in accordance to the concept of Labour Productivity?
If Labour Productivity is too broad of a term, then I will qualify to be speaking about it in context of ...
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3answers
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Why is Land not considered as a fixed capital?
As far as I know 'Fixed Capital' includes things which don't deteriorate or get used up upto a long, e.g. tools, machinery and building etc. My question is that since Land fulfills this criteria, why ...
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Quarterly industry-level productivity growth?
Are there any quarterly data on industry-level productivity growth (i.e., by NAICS code) in the United States? I've looked around for a while but haven't been able to find anything. BLS publishes ...
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200 views
Can higher working hours reduce productivity?
Are there studies about the impact on per-hour output (productivity) of increasing the number of hours worked each week by employees? If every employee works 3hrs/week longer (from 41 to 44hrs), does ...
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2answers
124 views
Workforce productivity
If I would like to say, in a technical way, that the problem of a place is its lazy people, then I could say that its workforce productivity is low. However, "workforce productivity" is composed by ...
