The machine tool industry is tiny but crucial: it supplies the machines to cut, form, and shape metals upon which about half of the manufacturing industries are dependent. The state of the art of the machine tools themselves, their control systems and the organization surrounding them largely...

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This paper raises several issues concerning productivity analysis. An attempt is made to demonstrate the usefulness of a micro-based approach to productivity analysis which challenges some basic assumptions of conventional analyses based on aggregate production functions. With the help of a...

This paper uses a simple model to explore the effects of "increasing demand risk" on business fixed investment. We show that within a putty-clay framework an increase in demand uncertainty can be expected to have two countervailing effects. On the one hand increasing risk tends to induce a firm...

This paper presents statistical evidence on (1) the importance of "soft" capital spending items like marketing and R&D investments, and (2) the dominant service content of production in the modern manufacturing firm. It pictures the firm as a dominantly information processing entity that has...