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...

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...

A longstanding issue in empirical economics is the behavior of average labor productivity over the business cycle. This paper provides new insights into the cyclicality of aggregate productivity at the plant level as well as the role of reallocation across plants over the cycle. We find that...

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...

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...

A longstanding issue in empirical economics is the behavior of average labor productivity over the business cycle. This paper provides new insights into the cyclicality of aggregate labor productivity by examining the cyclical behavior of productivity at the plant level as well as the role of...