What Is Driving The TFP Slowdown? Insights From a Schumpeterian DSGE Model

Pinchetti, Marco (2020): What Is Driving The TFP Slowdown? Insights From a Schumpeterian DSGE Model.

Abstract

In this paper, I incorporate a Schumpeterian mechanism of creative destruction in a medium-scale DSGE framework. In the model, a sector of profit-maximizing innovators invests in R&D and endogenously gen- erates productivity gains, ultimately determining the economy's growth rate. I estimate the model using Bayesian methods on U.S. data of the last 25 years (1993q1-2018q4) in order to disentangle the key forces underlying the productivity slowdown experienced by the US economy since the early 2000s. In contrast with the previous literature, I exploit Fernald (2014) data on TFP, factor utilization and labour quality to discipline the production function, and find that the bulk of the TFP slowdown is due to a decrease in innovation's ability to generate TFP gains. These findings challenge the view of a large part of the literature, according to which the recent TFP dynamics in the US are mostly driven by demand slumps and/or liquidity crunches.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: DSGE model, Endogenous TFP, Schumpeterian Growth, TFP Slowdown
• Subjects: E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E2 - Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy > E24 - Employment ; Unemployment ; Wages ; Intergenerational Income Distribution ; Aggregate Human Capital ; Aggregate Labor Productivity; E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E3 - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles > E32 - Business Fluctuations ; Cycles; E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E5 - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit; O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O4 - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity > O47 - Empirical Studies of Economic Growth ; Aggregate Productivity ; Cross-Country Output Convergence

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