What's driving the new economy?: the benefits of workplace innovation

This paper argues that changes in workplace organization, including the usage of self-managed teams, incentive pay, and employee voice, have been a significant component of the turnaround in productivity growth in the United States during the 1990s. Our work goes beyond measuring the impact of computers on productivity and finds that these types of workplace innovation appear to explain a large part of the movement in multi-factor productivity in the United States over the period 1993-1996. These results suggest additional dimensions to the recent productivity growth in the US that may well have implications for productivity growth potential in Europe.