Productivity Growth Inflation And Unemployment

Publisher Description

The essays in this book extend and elaborate on many of the important ideas Solow has either originated or developed in the past three decades.

By 'economic growth' economists mean, in the first place, annual increases in the nation's total output of goods and services -- its national product. Maintaining rapid economic growth depends increasingly on productivity gains, particularly in the service sector. Economic growth and the productivity are impacted by individual enterprises, industrial sectors and the wider economy. The standard of living of a country is profoundly effected by economic growth and productivity. One of the key questions within the debate on economic growth and productivity is the effect of information technology on the system. This new book presents leading edge research on this exciting topic.

We propose a theory of low-frequency movements in unemployment based on asymmetric real wage rigidities. The theory generates two main predictions: long-run unemployment increases with (i) a fall in long-run productivity growth and (ii) a rise in the variance of productivity growth. Evidence based on U.S. time series and on an international panel strongly supports these predictions. The empirical specifications featuring the variance of productivity growth can account for two U.S. episodes which a linear model based only on long-run productivity growth cannot fully explain. These are the decline in long-run unemployment over the 1980s and its rise during the late 2000s.

From a post-war assumption that full employment could be maintained through demand management techniques, we now live in an entirely different world. The contributors to this volume consider whether full employment is possible or affordable.

Standard New Keynesian (NK) models feature an optimal inflation target well below two percent, limited welfare losses from business cycle fluctuations and long-term monetary neutrality. We develop a NK framework with labour market frictions, endogenous productivity and downward wage rigidity (DWR) which challenges these results. The model features a non-vertical long-run Phillips curve between inflation and unemployment and a trade-off between price distortions and output hysteresis that change the welfare-maximizing inflation level. For a plausible set of parameters, the optimal inflation target is in excess of two percent, a target value commonly used across central banks. Deviations from the optimal target carry welfare costs multiple times higher than in traditional NK models. The main reason is that endogenous growth and DWR generate asymmetric and hysteresis effects on unemployment and output. Price level targeting or a Taylor-rule responding to the unemployment rate can handle better the asymmetric and hysteresis effects in our model and deliver significant welfare gains. Our results are robust to the inclusion of the effective lower bound on the monetary policy interest rate.