Productivity and potential output before, during, and after the great recession

The past two decades have seen the rise and fall of exceptional US productivity growth. This paper argues that labor and total factor productivity (TFP) growth slowed prior to the Great Recession. It marked a retreat from the exceptional, but temporary, information technologyfueled pace from the mid-1990s to early in the twenty-first century. This retreat implies slower output growth going forward as well as a narrower output gap than recently estimated by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO 2014a).