This paper investigates procyclical productivity and attempts to discriminate among several competing explanations. The study focuses on the United States and Japan, since the different industrial relations in these two economies serve to cast a sharper light on the procyclical productivity...

We infer the role of price expectations in forming the U.S. housing boom in the early-2000s from examining housing inventories. We use a reduced form model to show that agents invest in vacant homes when they anticipate prices will increase. Empirically, vacancy can discriminate between price...

This paper shows that rising real estate prices reduce industry productivity, because they lead to a reallocation of capital and labor towards inefficient firms. I establish that the rise in real estate value during the US housing boom relaxes firms' financial constraints. Companies borrow...