عدم قطعیت پرداخت، تقسیم کار و کاهش بهره وری در افسردگی بزرگ

This paper proposes a simple model that formalizes a variant of Ohanian's conjecture explaining the productivity declines observed in the Great Depression [Ohanian, L.E., 2001. Why did productivity fall so much during the Great Depression? American Economic Review 91 (2), 34–38]. If a large payment shock like an asset-price collapse renders many firms insolvent, other economic agents become exposed to a higher risk of not being paid (payment uncertainty). The payment uncertainty causes endogenous disruptions of the division of labor among firms, thereby lowering macroeconomic productivity. The prediction of the model is that productivity correlates negatively with bankruptcies and positively with the cost share of intermediate inputs, which is consistent with the data from depression episodes. The model implies that the so-called failure of macroeconomic policy in the United States during the early 1930s, when a rash of bankruptcies occurred, could actually have been welfare enhancing, since the quick exit of insolvent agents can resolve payment uncertainty quickly.

The recently growing literature on great depressions,1 in which the general equilibrium growth model is normally used as the paradigm of the analyses, shows that productivity declines were the primary contributor to the depressions in many cases. It is shown that the declines in total factor productivity (TFP) explain almost all declines in output and investment during the 1929–1933 period in the United States (Cole and Ohanian, 1999; Chari et al., 2002). Hayashi and Prescott (2002) show that the protracted recession in Japan during the 1990s is consistent with a standard growth model, given the persistent slowdown of TFP growth. Bergoeing et al. (2002) find that the difference between the spectacular recovery of Chile and the long stagnation of Mexico subsequent to the external debt crises that hit both countries in the early 1980s is explained by the difference of recoveries of the productivity in both countries: The detrended TFP began to grow again quickly in Chile, while it continued to decline for a long period in Mexico. In Germany, Fisher and Hornstein (2002) find falling productivity was one of the most important contributors to the severe decline in the 1928–1932 period. Thus the literature has shown that general equilibrium growth theory can account for several depression episodes very well, taking productivity changes as given. The next question is what were the sources of the productivity declines in those depressions