Why do some leaders succeed while others fail? This question is important, but its complexitymakes it hard to study systematically. We examine an industry in which there are welldefinedobjectives, small teams, and exact measures of leaders’ characteristics. We showthat a strong predictor of a...

During the second part of the 1990s, the Israeli economy experienced a surge in labor productivity and total factor productivity, which was driven primarily by the manufacturing sector. This surge in productivity coincided with the full absorption and integration into the workforce of highly...

Theory predicts that mandated employment protections may reduce productivity by distortingproduction choices. Firms facing (non-Coasean) worker dismissal costs will curtail hiringbelow efficient levels and retain unproductive workers, both of which should affectproductivity. These theoretical...

Many organizations rely on teamwork, and yet field evidence on the impacts of team-basedincentives remains scarce. Compared to individual incentives, team incentives can affectproductivity by changing both workers’ effort and team composition. We present evidencefrom a field experiment...

Business support policies designed to raise productivity and employment are commonworldwide, but rigorous micro-econometric evaluation of their causal effects is rare. Weexploit multiple changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a major program to supportmanufacturing jobs...

This paper contributes to the literature on international firm activities and firm performance byproviding the first evidence on the link of productivity and both exports and foreign directinvestment (fdi) in services firms from a highly developed country. It uses unique new datafrom Germany -...

This paper investigates the role that idiosyncratic uncertainty plays in shaping social preferences over the degree of labor market flexibility, in a general equilibrium model of dynamic labor demand where the productivity of firms evolves over time as a Geometric Brownian motion...

This paper studies in the presence of flexible outsourcing the effects of outsourcing costs, productivity of outsourcing, wage tax and tax exemption in an imperfectly competitive labour markets when labour unions and firms negotiate wages and the impacts of labour tax progression on domestic...

This paper examines the impact of North-South trade-related technology diffusion on TFP growth in small and large states in the South. The main findings are: i) TFP growth increases with North-South trade-related technology diffusion, with education, and with the interaction between the two, and...

In labor markets with worker and firm heterogeneity, the matching between firms and workersmay be assortative, meaning that the most productive workers and firms team up. Weinvestigate this with longitudinal population-wide matched employer-employee data fromPortugal...