Suchergebnisse

A central question in the empirical fiscal policy literature is the magnitude, in fact even the sign, of the fiscal multiplier. Standard identification schemes for fiscal VAR models typically imply positive output as well as labor productivity responses to expansionary government spending shocks. The standard macro assumption of decreasing returns to labor, however, implies that expansionary government spending shocks should lead to increasing output and hours, but to decreasing labor productivity. To potentially reconcile theory and empirical analysis we impose, amongst other sign restrictions, opposite signs of the impulse responses of output and labor productivity to government spending shocks in eight- to ten-variable VAR models, estimated on quarterly US data. Doing so leads to contractionary effects of positive government spending shocks. This potentially surprising finding is robust to the inclusion of variable capital utilization rates and total factor productivity.

We examine the contribution to labor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector of investment in different intangible asset categories¿computerized information, innovative property, and economic competencies¿for a set of 18 European countries between 1995 and 2017, as well as whether this contribution varies between different groups of countries. The motivation is to go a step further and identify which single or combination of intangible assets are relevant. The main findings can be summarized as follows. Firstly, all the three different categories of intangible assets contribute to labor productivity growth. In particular, intangible assets related to economic competences together with innovative property assets have been identified as the main drivers; specifically, advertising and marketing, organizational capital, research and development (R&D) investment, and design. Secondly, splitting the sample of European Union (EU) member states into three groups¿northern, central and southern Europe¿allows for the identification of a significant differentiated behavior between and within groups, in terms of the effects of investment in intangible assets on labor productivity growth. We conclude that measures promoting investment in intangibles at EU level should be accompanied by specific measures focusing on each country's needs, for the purpose of promoting labor productivity growth. The obtained evidence suggests that the solution for the innovation deficit of some European economies consist not only of raising R&D expenditure, but also exploiting complementarities between different types of assets.

The cyclical pattern of labor productivity has been a subject of discussion in the economic literature for long time with important theoretical implications. Many authors point out the role of labor market institutions as determinants of the cyclical pattern. For these authors, the loss of procyclicality experimented in the United States since the mid-1980s could be explained by decrease of rigidities in labor market. Following the literature, this paper explores the role of labor regulation by analyzing the case of Spain, which has gone in a few years from a strongly procyclical pattern to a counterciclycal one. Our results suggest that the high rigidity in wages and the great flexibility in labor, related to the temporary workers after the 1984 legislative reform, is the main cause of the countercyclical pattern of the Spanish labor productivity. Our findings are in line with previous papers highlighting the crucial influence of labor market institutions over the cyclical pattern.