Internet development holds the promise of transmitting economic value across physical space at zero marginal cost. In such a 'weightless economy', what factors matter for the location of economic activity and thus for economic development? This paper sketches a model of spatial dynamics over a...

Although Japanese economic growth after the Meiji Restoration is often characterised as a gradual process of trend acceleration, comparison with the United States suggests that catching-up only really started after 1950, due to the unusually dynamic performance of the US economy before 1950. A...

Recent work on the effects of permanent technology shocks argue that the basic RBC model cannot account for a negative correlation between hours worked and labour productivity. In this Paper, I show that this conjecture is not necessarily correct. In the basic RBC model, I find that hours worked...

This paper explores the role of replacement and innovation in shaping investment and productivity during episodes of lumpy adjustment in capital. To this purpose we use a rich firm-level panel of Spanish manufacturing data that combines information on equipment investment and firm's strategies....

Labour productivity in the US has recently grown more strongly than in most European countries. It is often argued that the American productivity increase is due to the widespread introduction of new information and communication technologies (ICT). But why have the same technologies not...

The paper extends the theoretical approach in Lazear (1986, 1996) to show that jobs with performance related pay (PRP) attract workers of higher unobservable ability, and also induce workers to provide greater effort. We then test some of the predictions of this model against data from the...

Some 300 profit-sharing schemes were introduced in Britain between 1865 and 1913. These were intended both to raise labour productivity and to improve industrial relations in the firms concerned. These schemes appear to have increased significantly the wages of eligible workers but were...

This paper provides three perspectives on long-run growth rates of labor productivity (LP) and of multi-factor productivity (MFP) for the U. S. economy. It extracts statistical growth trends for labor productivity from quarterly data for the total economy going back to 1952, provides new...

The debate about the long-term economic development of China compared with Europe has taken a new turn with the publication of Kenneth Pomeranz’ book on ‘The Great Divergence’, in which he maintains that before the Industrial Revolution the most advanced parts of China (in particular the...