I'm confused. The paper is about something called "Restaurant Productivity", but it's not defined up-front, or any place close to up-front. Maybe, it's defined by page 9, but it's hard to tell. It all might be completely correct, but for God's sake write a paper that a reasonably intelligent person can follow. What are we talking about? What do we know? What you think we know, but isn't true. What we now believe, having done the analysis. Quick summary, and then done. I think Goolsbee is famous somewhere, but why be a lead author on a badly written paper? It's just prose. Maybe it's true, but who'd know?
>Figure 1 shows the remarkable shift in restaurant productivity after
years of stagnation. It plots monthly real sales per employee in the industry
from the beginning of 1992 to the present (in annualized terms).2
Yes, and even on page 1: "reveal significant productivity growth among individual restaurants whether measured in sales per employee or even in a more basic/physical measure of total consumer visits per employee."
