Procyclical Productivity: Increasing Returns or Cyclical Utilization?
利用原材料投入作为资本和劳动利用率的代理变量，发现周期性要素利用是解释顺周期生产率的主要原因，而规模报酬接近不变，技术冲击影响较小。
This paper investigates the relative importance of cyclical fluctuations in labor and capital utilization, increasing returns to scale, and technology shocks as explanations for procyclical productivity. It exploits the intuition that materials inputs do not have variable utilization rates, and materials are likely to be used in fixed proportions with value added. Therefore, materials growth is a good measure of unobserved changes in capital and labor utilization. Using this measure shows that cyclical factor utilization is very important, returns to scale are about constant, and technology shocks are small and have low correlation with either output or hours growth.