Productivity growth in the paper and paperboard industries: a variable cost function approach

1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 1013-1020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno De Borger ◽  
Joseph Buongiorno

Annual indices of total productivity growth were calculated for the paper and paperboard industries of the United States between 1958 and 1981. The procedure relied on the hypothesis that each industry minimizes variable costs, conditional on the level of the remaining inputs. The variable cost functions revealed short-run economies of scale but long-run diseconomies, suggesting inefficient capacity expansion. Derived demands for energy, labor, and materials were inelastic. Demand for energy was much more responsive to price than labor and materials. There were substantial substitution possibilities between energy and materials and between labor and materials, but none between labor and energy. The productivity indices that were computed showed a slightly increasing rate of productivity growth between 1958 and 1973, with a marked slowdown thereafter. This slowdown was explained by the rise in the price of energy. Average productivity growth was three to four times faster in the paper than in the paperboard industry between 1958 and 1981. This difference was partly explained by higher energy intensiveness and lower labor productivity growth in the paperboard industry.

Author(s):  
Aref Emamian

This study examines the impact of monetary and fiscal policies on the stock market in the United States (US), were used. By employing the method of Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) developed by Pesaran et al. (2001). Annual data from the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, from 1986 to 2017 pertaining to the American economy, the results show that both policies play a significant role in the stock market. We find a significant positive effect of real Gross Domestic Product and the interest rate on the US stock market in the long run and significant negative relationship effect of Consumer Price Index (CPI) and broad money on the US stock market both in the short run and long run. On the other hand, this study only could support the significant positive impact of tax revenue and significant negative impact of real effective exchange rate on the US stock market in the short run while in the long run are insignificant. Keywords: ARDL, monetary policy, fiscal policy, stock market, United States


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-161
Author(s):  
Amir Kia

This paper analyses the direct impact of fiscal variables on private investment. The current literature ignores one or more fiscal variables and, in many cases, the foreign financing of debt. In this paper, an aggregate investment function for an economy in which firms incur adjustment costs in their investment process is developed. The developed model incorporates the direct impact of government expenditure, public debt and investment, deficits and foreign-financed debt on private investment. The model is tested on US data. It is found that public investment does not have any impact on private investment, but government expenditure, deficit, debt and foreign-financed debt crowd out private investment over the long run. However, deficit crowds in the private investment over the short run.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Quineche

Abstract This paper empirically examines the long-run relationship between consumption, asset wealth and labor income (i.e., cay) in the United States through the lens of a quantile cointegration approach. The advantage of using this approach is that it allows for a nonlinear relationship between these variables depending on the level of consumption. We estimate the coefficients using a Phillips–Hansen type fully modified quantile estimator to correct for the presence of endogeneity in the cointegrating relationship. To test for the null of cointegration at each quantile, we apply a quantile CUSUM test. Results show that: (i) consumption is more sensitive to changes in labor income than to changes in asset wealth for the entire distribution of consumption, (ii) the elasticity of consumption with respect to labor income (asset wealth) is larger at the right (left) tail of the consumption distribution than at the left (right) tail, (iii) the series are cointegrated around the median, but not in the tails of the distribution of consumption, (iv) using the estimated cay obtained for the right (left) tail of the distribution of consumption improves the long-run (short-run) forecast ability on real excess stock returns over a risk-free rate.


2016 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 1152-1181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Matheis

This article expands upon the current “resource curse” literature by using newly collected county data, spanning over a century, to capture the short- and long-run effects of coal mining activity. It provides evidence that increased levels of coal production had positive net impacts on county-level population and manufacturing activity over an initial ten-year span, which become negative over the subsequent decades. The results provide evidence that any existence of a “resource curse” on local areas due to coal mining is a long-run phenomenon, and in the short run there are potential net benefits.


1967 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 621-624 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Sylla

The connections between financial development and economic growth are drawing increased attention on many fronts. This dissertation studies ways in which the American financial system functioned to aid in the accumulation and mobilization of capital in the second half of the nineteenth century. The evolution of the banking system, by far the dominant nineteenth-century financial intermediary, is emphasized, but the role of Federal government finance is of scarcely less importance. The interrelated actions of the banks and the Treasury did much to set the tone in various financial markets during most of the period. While considerable study has been devoted to these actions and their short-run effects, much less has been written about their long-run implications. A major contention of the work is that financial strains caused by the Civil War and the various responses to these strains were accompanied by significant changes in the banking system—in its structure, the types of assets in which it dealt, and in its relations with the Treasury—all of which increased its potential for satisfying the demands placed upon it by a rapidly expanding economy. These changes helped to make capital, which may well have been the relatively scarce factor in the antebellum era, more abundant in the postwar Gilded Age, and they therefore abetted the rapid industrialization of those decades.


Author(s):  
Hartini Ab Ghani

In economics, a cost curve is a graph of the costs of production as a function of total quantity produced. In a free market economy, productively efficient firms optimize their production process by minimizing cost consistent with each possible level of production, and the result is a cost curve; and profit maximizing firms use cost curves to decide output quantities. There are various types of cost curves, all related to each other, including total and average cost curves; marginal ("for each additional unit") cost curves, which are equal to the differential of the total cost curves; and variable cost curves. Some are applicable to the short run, others to the long run.


2016 ◽  
Vol I (I) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Mehmood Kakar ◽  
Adiqa Kiani ◽  
Asia Baig

This article examines the determinants of the total productivity of the agriculture sector which enhances the total agricultural productivity in Pakistan and analyzes the relations among variables used for the analysis from 1990 - 2017. The application of the auto regressive distributed lag technique ARDL was used to approximate various determinants. The area under cultivation, fertilizer consumption, agriculture credit, and rainfall show a positive effect on agriculture productivity, whereas agriculture employment and pesticide consumption show a positive but statistically insignificant effect on agricultural productivity in the long run. While in the short-run all determinants have a positive and significant effect on total agriculture productivity convergence towards equilibrium is shown by error correction term is 0.829.


Author(s):  
Deergha Raj Adhikari Ph.D.

Last year, the Trump administration imposed import tariffs of 10 and 25 percent on the import of steel and aluminium respectively. The administration also imposed an additional tariff on more than $200 billion worth of imports from China. In this study, we examine the welfare impact of such tariffs on the U.S. welfare in general. We apply Ju and Krishna’s (2003) sufficient condition for trade reform to be welfare enhancing and test the condition using an import function. The sufficient condition for a trade policy (i.e. the import tariff) to be welfare improving as laid out by them requires that the value of import be higher than that before tariffs when the value of import before and after both are evaluated at post-tariff prices. Based on this condition, we develop an import function, in which the value of U.S. import (IMt) is a function of import price index (IPIt) and U.S. real GDP (URGDPt). If the coefficient associated with IPI turns out to be positive and significant, then we conclude that the rise in import price including that due to the import tariff, will increase the value of import satisfying the sufficient condition for welfare improvement, which leads us to conclude that the import tariff has improved U.S. welfare. We estimated our model using Vector Error Correction technique. In the long run equation, the coefficient associated with the variable 〖IPI〗_(t-1) is found to be negative and significant at 5% significance level, implying that an increase in import price caused by a tariff will lower the value of import in the long run. In the short-run equation, on the other hand, the coefficients associated with the variables 〖ΔIPI〗_(t-1) and 〖ΔIPI〗_(t-2) both turned out to be positive but insignificant, which implies that any tariff-raised increase in import price will have no effect on the value of import in the short run failing to satisfy the sufficient condition. Therefore, we conclude that the import tariff currently imposed by the United States may not improve U.S. welfare and may rather worsen it in the long run.


2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Muhammad ◽  
Constanza Valdes

AbstractExport tax reform in Argentina could improve its competitiveness in China’s soybean market, displacing exports from competing countries like Brazil and the United States. We examined the factors that determine China’s demand for imported soybean products and how export taxes could affect exporting countries. Using import demand and vector autoregression estimates, we conducted simulations of China’s import demand assuming the elimination of export taxes in Argentina. Results indicated that Argentine soybean products could realize gains in the Chinese market, but only in the short run. Projected import demand changes in the long run were insignificant for all exporting countries.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Derek Zweig

We explore the relationship between unemployment and inflation in the United States (1949-2019) through both Bayesian and spectral lenses. We employ Bayesian vector autoregression (“BVAR”) to expose empirical interrelationships between unemployment, inflation, and interest rates. Generally, we do find short-run behavior consistent with the Phillips curve, though it tends to break down over the longer term. Emphasis is also placed on Phelps’ and Friedman’s NAIRU theory using both a simplistic functional form and BVAR. We find weak evidence supporting the NAIRU theory from the simplistic model, but stronger evidence using BVAR. A wavelet analysis reveals that the short-run NAIRU theory and Phillips curve relationships may be time-dependent, while the long-run relationships are essentially vertical, suggesting instead that each relationship is primarily observed over the medium-term (2-10 years), though the economically significant medium-term region has narrowed in recent decades to roughly 4-7 years. We pay homage to Phillips’ original work, using his functional form to compare potential differences in labor bargaining power attributable to labor scarcity, partitioned by skill level (as defined by educational attainment). We find evidence that the wage Phillips curve is more stable for individuals with higher skill and that higher skilled labor may enjoy a lower natural rate of unemployment.


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