Questions tagged [productivity]
A measure of efficiency in production for some given set of inputs
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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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Does diversity lead to more productivity?
Is it true that "Companies with diverse workforces outperform those with homogenous teams"? That's what TrendsWatching says anyway. And is it "diverse workforce" or "workforce ...
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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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How does GNU software development sustain economically?
I apologise if this question is out of topic, but it is simultaneously an economy and a programming question. If it should go to another SE communality, please indicate me.
In theory, GNU software is ...
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Does recycling lead to fewer jobs?
Say I buy a glass bottle, I can either put it in the landfill or recycle it.
My understanding is, glass will breakdown into sand. (Not sure how well though, since we sometimes find glass from Roman ...
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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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All else being equal, What is the value of job creation?
Job creation value
Just to clarify, I have no experience, academic background or deep understanding of economics. Apologies for such a basic question but I couldn't find a real answer.
I hear a lot ...
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What are the causes for the recent dramatic decline in productivity in the US
The recent Q2 release by the BLS on "Productivity and Costs", shows a big drop in productivity (the biggest ever since 1948): more work-hours but less output.
Nonfarm business sector labor ...
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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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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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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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Empirical ranking of firms based on productivity
I want to rank firms based on a metric, let's call it productivity.
Theoretically, this firm productivity measure may be well defined. Empirically, however, data that account for all dimensions of ...
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Has Stack Overflow been economically beneficial to programmer productivity?
Has Stack Overflow an overall positive impact on programmers productivity?
On one side, it takes time and effort to ask and answer questions -- thus decreasing productivity.
On the other side, ...
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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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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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Error while estimating a production function with prodest package in R
I have an unbalanced panel with 15063 firms between 2012 and 2018.
I am using this code to estimate the production function with Levinsohn & Petrin method:
...
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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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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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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 ...
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Can capital still be paid its marginal product in the absence of a homogeneous capital stock?
Thomas Piketty's best-selling book on inequality, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" has attracted a lot of criticism on the right for its data analysis. Less well-known, however, is the criticism ...
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CES aggregator for intermediates with heterogeneous productivity
I'm following Atkeson, Burstein (2019 JPE), and cannot understand the aggregation result.
There is measure $M(z)$ of firms with productivity $z$, with production function
$$
y(z) = z k(z)^\alpha l(z)^...
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Steady-state savings rate
I'm having trouble with the steady-state savings rate type of problems.
Here is the problem I'm stuck on:
The production is $Y = 0.5*K^{1/3}(AN)^{2/3}$.
If savings is $s$%, what are the steady-state ...
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If automation implicitly increases wealth, why is it generally considered undesirable?
When it comes to the subject of automation, I read that the wide majority of the arguments assume that the profits/savings "vanish", alongside the jobs loss.
I see the reasoning above as flawed ...
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How to improve the underperforming construction productivity by correcting its market failures?
Globally, labor-productivity growth in construction has averaged only 1 percent a year over the past two decades, compared with growth of 2.8 percent for the total world economy and 3.6 percent in the ...
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When does a high markup mean high productivity? Never?
I was reading this article in VoxEU, where the authors (one is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University) make the case that an increasing average mark-up has accounted for much of the late ...
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What are the causes of increase in productivity of labour?
This question has a specific context.
While reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, edited, with notes and marginal summary by Edwin Cannan in 1904, one comes across the following lines on the ...
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Growth Accounting
In growth accounting the production function is defined as follows:
$$Y= AF(K,L) $$
That means output $Y$ is dependent upon capital $K$, labour $L$ and technology $A$. Now to produce something, in ...
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Intuition behind value added as TFP measure
In some papers the authors use value-added over capital and labor as TFP measure, what is the intuition behind this?
For example, in one paper I just read the authors use
$ \frac{VA}{(p_{K}K + p_{L}L)}...
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TFP estimation in R by using prodest and estprod packages
I am writing my Bachelor Thesis and I really need help with the TFP estimation. so far I have a dataset with log values of Value added (va), Labour (l), Capital (k), and Materials (m). The initial ...
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Arellano and Bond (1991) GMM estimation in R by using plm package
I am a last-year student at university, currently working on my Bachelor's (so still learning R), and I really hope that you would suggest a potential solution (even if to use Python).
So, the main ...
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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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Why low labour productivity for Govt Services in UK and USA in 2000s?
My labour productivity data for USA and UK show that the "Government services" sector for both countries are below their economies' average.
This trend is observed in the 2000s.
Are there any ...
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Why does entitlements leads to lower US productivity? [closed]
In a recent Bloomberg interview, Alan Greenspan suggested that entitlements leads to lower productivity, can you please explain it?
What does 'capital stocks' mean?
Does he means that because we ...
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Human Capital Vs TFP
I'm interested in familiarizing myself with some of the intra-debates that have occurred over the years, having to do with Mankiw, Romer, Weil (1992) and Klenow, Rodriguez-Clare (1997). Some argue ...
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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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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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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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Are prices part of total factor productivity?
I am trying to understand how production is related to income/profit and where do prices enter. Suppose there is a single firm with a Cobb-Douglas production technology:
$$Y=AK^{\alpha}L^{\beta}$$
...
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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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Arellano and Bond (1991) or Blundell and Bond (1998) in R estimation
I have the following problem with the Arellano and Bond (1991) or Blundell and Bond (1998) estimators in R using the plm package. I receive the following problem when trying to run the needed ...
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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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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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Why in Italy and Spain, as productivity grows, wages don't grow too?
As you can see in this report: https://rpubs.com/lovepeacejoy404/crescita_salariale between labor productivity and the average wage there is a correlation of 76% (Pearson index), while with the ...
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What is establishment-level data
National level or aggregate level data and firm-level data are self explanatory. I have seen certain papers on productivity analysis as well as other topics which refer to "establishment-level" data. ...
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etymology of TFP (total factor productivity)
In economics, total-factor productivity (TFP), also called
multi-factor productivity, is usually measured as the ratio of
aggregate output (e.g., GDP) to aggregate inputs.1 Under some
simplifications ...
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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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Basic New Keynesian model with flexible price
I would like to know what would be the response of variables in the Basic New Keynesian model but with flexible prices (ie not with Calvo pricing). For example I have troubles to see how having ...
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Why labor-augmenting technological progress increases employment and wages?
My textbook says that advances in technology typically raise the marginal product of labor and shift the labor demand curve to the right and calls it labor-augmenting technological advances. The book ...
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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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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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