The Spanish Productivity Puzzle in the Great Recession

Abstract

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The great trade collapse and the Spanish export miracle: Firm‐level evidence from the crisis

“…The overall performance at the industry‐level was poor: in 18 of 20 industries TFP declined between 2007 and 2012. While beyond the scope of this paper, analysing these issues in more detail might prove fruitful in future research (see Hospido & Moreno‐Galbis, , for a first study in this direction).…”

Countercyclical Labor Productivity: The Spanish Anomaly

“…Dolado, Sebastián and Valles (1993) already stressed the volatility of employment as the cause of counter-cyclicality. Hospido and Moreno (2015) finds a negative correlation between the proportion of temporary workers and MFP in the period 1996-2012. However, they show a negative correlation between the proportion of temporary work during the period of expansion (1995 -2008) but also a positive correlation in the contraction (2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012), which can be explained for the labor factor adjustment mainly on temporary workers, thus the few survivors are more productive on average than the permanent workers.…”

“…This absence of investment is consistent in our model with a lower productivity of temporary workers. The inverse correlation between percentage of temporary work and productivity has been detected by Hospido and Moreno (2015). If we consider a null training investment in temporary workers, we obtain the following two different functions of labor demand depending on the kind of workers:…”

The Right Kind of Help? Tax Incentives for Staying Small

“…Weak firm balance sheets have negative implications for firm productivity and investment (Duval et al, 2017, Adler et. al., 2017, IMF 2016aand 2017a, and Hospido et. al., 2015.…”