The R&D Puzzle in U.S. Manufacturing Productivity Growth

Danial Lashkari and Jeremy Pearce
Additional contact information
Danial Lashkari: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/economists/Lashkari

No 20250106, Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: In a previous post, we provided evidence for a broad-based slowdown in productivity growth across industries and firms in the U.S. manufacturing sector starting in 2010. Since firms’ investment in research and development (R&D) for new technologies constitutes a central driver of productivity growth, in this post we ask if the observed slowdown in productivity may be due to a decline in R&D. We find that “R&D intensity” has been increasing at both the firm and industry level, even as productivity growth declines. This points to a decline in the effectiveness of R&D in generating productivity growth in U.S. manufacturing.

Keywords: productivity; manufacturing; innovation; competition; economic growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O33 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-01-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eff, nep-ino and nep-sbm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025 ... productivity-growth/ Full text (text/html)

Related works:
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:fip:fednls:99374

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().