Do low interest rates contribute to the rise in market concentration? Using data on firm financials and high frequency monetary policy shocks, we find that falling interest rates disproportionately benefit industry leaders, especially when the initial interest rate is already low. Falling rates...

This paper proposes a tractable framework to analyze fiscal space and the dynamics of government debt, with a possibly binding zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint. Without the ZLB, a greater primary deficit unambiguously raises debt. However, debt need not explode: When R G - φ, where φ is the...

This paper presents a comparative analysis of productivity growth in the U.S. and Japanese electrical machinery industries in the postwar period. This industry has experienced rapid growth in output and productivity and high rates of capital formation in both countries. A substantial amount of...

The paper analyzes the production structure and the demand for inputs in three major industrialized countries, the U.S., Japan and Germany. A dynamic factor demand model with two variable inputs (labor and energy)and two quasi-fixed inputs (capital and R&D) is derived directly from an...

This paper is an attempt to assess the contribution of R&D to growth of output in U.S. manufacturing industries. The important issues to address are: whether the slower growth of R&D expenditures in recent years has been the cause of slowdown in the growth of productivity, and what the factors...