 Why did productivity fall so much during the Great Depression?Quarterly Review, 2002, vol. 26, issue Spr Abstract: This study assesses five common explanations for the large decline in U.S. total factor productivity (TFP) during the Great Depression: changes in capacity utilization, factor input quality, and production composition; labor hoarding; and increasing returns to scale. The study finds that these factors explain less than one-third of the 18 percent TFP decline between 1929 and 1933. The rest of the decline remains unexplained. The study offers a potential explanation: declines in organization capital, the knowledge firms use to organize production, caused by breakdowns in relationships between firms and their suppliers, for example. As some firms failed during the Depression, efficiency in surviving firms decreased; managers had to shift time away from production in order to establish new relationships, and firms had to shift to unfamiliar technologies that initially were operated inefficiently. This article originally appeared in the American Economic Review. (c) 2001 by the American Economic Association. Keywords: Econometric models; Depressions; Industrial productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedmqr:y:2002:i:spr:n:v.26no.2 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Quarterly Review from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Contact information at EDIRC. |
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