Productivity slowdown: reducing the measure of our ignorance

Timo Boppart and Huiyu Li

No 16478, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Growth accounting suggests that the bulk of the post-2004 slowdown in output growth in the U.S. is attributed to a residual called TFP. In this paper we provide a tractable accounting framework with firm heterogeneity to link this residual to innovations, markup dispersion, and potential measurement errors. Theories of creative destruction offer rich testable predictions of how the quality upgrading of products, the process efficiency of different firms, and markup dispersion in the market interact and therefore constitute a key approach to shed light on the slowdown in TFP growth. Surveying the literature on measurement, we conclude that measurement errors is unlikely to explain the recent deceleration in TFP growth.

Keywords: Growth accounting; Development accounting; Growth slowdown; Measurement; Innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 O47 O51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16478 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Productivity Slowdown: Reducing the Measure of Our Ignorance (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:16478

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16478

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().