This paper analyses plant entry, total factor productivity growth, average productivity level differentials and turnovers across Colombia's petrochemical industry for the 1974-1998 period. Results show that successful entrants shaped industry productivity and induced plant restructuring among...

This paper applies a stochastic frontier production model to the data from Penn World Table’s 49 countries over the period 1965-1990, to decompose total factor productivity growth into technical change and technical efficiency change. Empirical results show East Asian countries led the...

Recent evidence based on longitudinal firm-level data suggests that within-firm productivity growth explains about 50 percent of total factor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector while net entry effects account for about 30 percent of total factor productivity growth. These two forces...

We investigate the relationship between exports and productivity in the Turkish apparel and motor vehicle and parts industries from 1990-1996, using two different models for plant-level panel data. In the first model, we examine the effect of past export status on current productivity both with...

Chile put into place broad free trade agreements (FTAs) with its two major trading partners: the EU (effective 2003) and the US (effective 2004). This paper quanti- fies their economic effects for the Chilean economy, stemming from the conventional trade components (lower tariffs and higher...

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of the impact of infrastructure development on economic growth and income distribution using a large panel data set encompassing over 100 countries and spanning the years 1960-2000. The empirical strategy involves the estimation of simple equations for...

Since a big proportion of the labor force in developing countries belongs to the self-employment sector, it is desirable to build models to study these dynamics. Previous works study the occupational choices of agents. The most recent ones build general equilibrium economies with three types of...

Human capital plays an important role in the theory of economic growth, but it has been difficult to measure this abstract concept. We survey the psychological literature on cross-cultural IQ tests, and conclude that modern intelligence tests are well-suited for measuring an important form of a...

We attempt to explain why standard explanations of the poverty of nations are unsatisfactory. We first argue that human capital is low in poor countries because its production has increasing returns with respect to life expectancy. We then show that the reason why capital does not flow to poor...

In this presentation I view a Malmquist productivity index as a theoretical index with desirable properties. I then discuss the properties of three approximations to it: an empirical Malmquist index, and Fisher and Tornqvist indexes. Next I discuss the decomposition properties of the theoretical...