This paper examines the profit testing of life insurance companies that issue participating policies, type B and type A universal life policies, and variable annuities with guaranteed minimum maturity and death benefits, when investment returns are stochastic and modeled by normal or variance...

Combining micro and macro data, we construct demand-side shocks, which we take to be exogenous for individual firms. We estimate a reduced-form model to describe how firms adjust their production, employment, capital stock, and inventories in response to such shocks. Then, we chose the...

Potential growth - the rate of expansion an economy can sustain at full capacity and employment - is a critical driver of development progress. It is also a major input in the formulation of fiscal and monetary policies over the business cycle. This paper introduces the most comprehensive...

Potential output growth around the world slowed over the past two decades. This slowdown is expected to continue in the remainder of the 2020s: global potential growth is projected to average 2.2 percent per year in 2022-30, 0.4 percentage point below its 2011-21 average. Emerging market and...

Across the world, a structural growth slowdown is underway: at current trends, the global potential growth rate - the maximum rate at which an economy can grow without igniting inflation - is expected to fall to a three-decade low over the remainder of the 2020s. The slowdown could be even more...

This chapter analyzes the effect of intangible investment on firm efficiency with an emphasis on its software component. Stochastic production frontier approach is used to simultaneously estimate the production function and the determinants of technical efficiency in the software intensive...

The European Union Emissions Trading System has raised concerns about possible detrimental effects on firms production through an increase in polluting costs, unless firms change inputs or increase the efficiency in the way they produce. We provide evidence of the causal impact of this policy on...

By regulating how firms collect, store, and use data, privacy laws may change the role of data in production and alter firm demand for information technology inputs. We study how firms respond to privacy laws in the context of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by using seven...

We test the hypotheses that zombie firms are less productive and have lower employment growth and lower gross investment ratios than non-zombie firms in the same industry sector and that they are a source of contagion for the latter. Ever since Caballero et al. (2008), it has been taken for...