NBER Publications by John Baldwin

A statistical agency faces several challenges in building Productivity Accounts. What started out as a request for simple ratios of output to employment has moved to a demand for multifactor (total factor) productivity measures that take into account both labor and capital inputs, the compositional changes in both, and price corrections for the changing quality of outputs. The challenge that faces users of productivity measures is that many series often exist within statistical agencies that can be used on an ad hoc basis by outsiders to generate productivity estimates; however, these series often generate conflicting estimates. Only by pulling together data into one coherent consistent framework can the statistical agency solve the problem of "multiple" stories. This can be done by deve...

In recent years a growing number of countries have constructed data series on job creation and job destruction using establishment- level data sets. This paper provides a description and detailed comparison of these new data series for the United States and Canada. First, the Canadian and United States industry-level job creation and destruction rates are remarkably similar. Industries with high (low) job creation in the U.S. exhibit high (low) job creation in Canada. The same is true for job destruction. In addition, the overall magnitude of gross job flows in the two countries is comparable. Second, the time-series patterns of creation and destruction are qualitatively similar but do differ in a number of important respects. In both countries, job destruction is much more cyclically v...