Empirical evidence on the relationship between technology shocks and e.g. hours worked hinges crucially on the identification of the unobservable technological progress. In this paper, we study different measures of technology in order to find out (i) to what extent they capture the same...

We develop a stochastic general equilibrium model in which maintenance endogenously affects the capital depreciation rate. The model performs well in generating maintenance series that match closely existing survey-based measures for Canada. Maintenance is procyclical and comoves almost always...

Conventional RBC models have been heavily criticized for their inability to generate the estimated negative correlations of hours and productivity in response to technology shocks ('productivity-hours puzzle'). In this paper we show that by just enhancing the standard frame- work with investment...

This paper provides evidence for the impact of technology, labor supply, monetary policy and aggregate spending shocks on hours worked in the Euro area. The evidence is based on a vector autoregression identi?ed using sign restrictions that are consistent with both sticky price and real business...

The reaction of hours worked to technology shocks represents a key controversy between RBC and New Keynesian explanations of the business cycle. It sparked a large empirical literature with contrasting results. We demonstrate that, with a more general and data coherent supply and production...

How do international labor markets respond to a technology shock and what is the main transmission channel across countries with different labor market institutions? To answer these questions, I identify technology shocks using the approach of Galí (1999) and decompose the responses of total...

Using a novel data set, we reassess the evidence for (or against) a key implication of the basic RBC model: that aggregate hours worked respond positively to a positive technology shock. Two novel aspects of the analysis are the scope (14 OECD countries) and the inclusion of data on both labor...

Can the standard search-and-matching labor market model replicate the business cycle fluctuations of the job finding rate and the unemployment rate? In the model, fluctuations are prominently driven by productivity shocks which are commonly interpreted as technology shocks. I estimate different...

In this paper a two-sector growth model allowing indeterminacy to occur at relatively mild degrees of increasing returns is developed. It is shown that these economies of scale need only be present in one sector of the economy (investment). This feature of the model, therefore, builds on...

We study the relationship between technology shocks and labor input on Swedish firm-level data using a production function approach to identify technology shocks. Taking standard steps yields a contractionary contemporaneous labor-input response in line with previous studies. This finding may,...