We examine the relationship between lax monetary policy, access to high-yield bond markets and productivity in the US … higher risk profile. Since the relationship between credit ratings and firm-level productivity is U-shaped, the aggregate … effect on productivity is a priori unclear. Turning to the real economy, we thus analyse whether this additional access to …

s differed from its predecessors in three important respects: productivity, inflation, and cyclical variability. In the … United States, labor productivity increased much faster in the 1990s than in the previous decades and, contrary to the usual … pattern, accelerated with the duration of the expansion. The view that most of the productivity acceleration was only cyclical …