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For Economic Stimulus, Try Giving People Coupons, Not CashThe labor productivity rate measures the amount of real GDP produced by an hour of labor. And in the United States, labor productivity has slowed sharply in recent years. From 2005 through the third quarter of 2015, it averaged just 1.3 percent growth per year, a significant drop from the 2.8 percent average yearly growth between 1995 and 2004.
The cause of the slowdown has been hotly debated, with some economists arguing it is mostly illusory, a result of mismeasurement. But Chicago Booth’s Chad Syverson tests and casts doubt on a theory at the core of the mismeasurement hypothesis: the notion that productivity statistics aren’t taking into account the surplus generated from the digital revolution.
Syverson starts by calculating productivity on the premise that the productivity slump didn’t happen. Using conservative estimates, he finds that the counterfactual output in the third quarter of 2015 would be 15 percent higher than the actual measured output.
But the consumer surplus created by digital technology fails to explain this $2.7 trillion in lost ouput. And three additional data patterns pose trouble for the mismeasurement hypothesis.
The cumulative impact of these patterns suggests that the mismeasurement hypothesis is hard to reconcile with the facts. The productivity slowdown has opened an unexplained gap equal to 15 percent of GDP, while the value of digital technologies in total accounted for only 7.7 percent of GDP before the slowdown. The US labor productivity decline since 2004 appears to be legitimate.
Chad Syverson, “Challenges to Mismeasurement Explanations for the US Productivity Slowdown,” NBER working paper, February 2016.
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