This paper examines a quasi-experiment in which we encourage student effort by setting various weekly incentives to engage in online tests. Our identification strategy exploits i) weekly variation in incentives to determine their impact on student effort, and ii) controlled cross-group variation...

Firms exhibit heterogeneity in size, productivity, and internal structure, and this is true even within the same industry. It has been thought since the time of Adam Smith that a firm's internal structure affects its productivity through the channel of gains from specialization. Our paper...

This paper argues that endogenous restructuring processes within firms towards productivityenhancing human resource activities, triggered by advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) and rising supply of educated workers, are typically associated with higher demand for...

This note provides a useful property of the Allen-Uzawa partials for the translog cost function. It also suggests how the main results extend to any functional form with certain properties. The curvature of the Allen-Uzawa matrix is the same as the curvature of the Hessian matrix. Intuitively...

Using a large longitudinal, nationally representative workplace-level dataset, we explore the productivity gains associated with computer use and organizational redesign. The empirical strategy involves the estimation of a production function, augmented to account for technology use and...

Die künftige Entwicklung am Arbeitsmarkt ist von drei Megatrends geprägt: Einer Verlagerung unternehmerischer Verantwortung und Risiken auf Arbeitnehmer, steigenden fachlichen Qualifikationsanforderungen und einem drastischen Rückgang des Erwerbspersonenpotentials infolge des demographischen...

To investigate the size and the timing of the direct impact of participatory arrangements on business performance, we assemble and analyze extraordinary daily data - for rejection, production and downtime rates for all operators in a single plant during a 35 month period, more than 77,000...

Institutional change has taken place gradually since 1978 for State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the Industrial Sector of China. In this paper we estimate the effect of deep reform (the right to hire and fire labour, buy and sell capital and operate on international markets) on the productivity...

Economic development implies that the efficiency of firms in developing countries is approaching that of firms in advanced economies. We examine the extent of this convergence in the Czech Republic and Russia, economies that represent alternative models of implementing development policies,...

Using a model of O-ring production function, the paper demonstrates how certain communities can get caught in a low-literacy trap in which each individual finds it not worthwhile investing in higher skills because others are not high-skilled. The model sheds light on educational policy. It is...