This paper provides technical documentation to accompany the NBER manufacturing productivity (MP) database. The database contains information on 450 4-digit manufacturing industries for the period 1958 through 1991. The data are compiled from various official sources, most notably the Annual...

A longstanding puzzle of empirical economics is that average labor productivity declines during recessions and increases during booms. This paper provides a framework to assess the empirical importance of competing hypotheses for explaining the observed procyclicality. For each competing...

The conventional wisdom is that the rising productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector in the 1980s has been driven by the apparently pervasive downsizing over this period. Aggregate evidence clearly shows falling employment accompanying the rise in productivity. In this paper, we examine the...

In this paper we build upon previous work on external economies in manufacturing [Caballero and Lyons (1989, 1990)] by providing new evidence helpful for discriminating between different types of externalities. We investigate four-digit level input-output relationships and find that, over...

This paper combines different strands of the productivity literature to investigate the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. On the one hand, a growing body of empirical research has been relating cross-country differences in key economic outcomes, such...