Sunk costs for R&D are an important determinant of the level of innovation in the economy. In this paper I recover them using a Markov equilibrium framework. The contribution is twofold. First, a model of industry dynamics which accounts for selection into R&D, capital accumulation and...

How and by how much do supervisors enhance worker productivity? Using a company-based data set on the productivity of technology-based services workers, supervisor effects are estimated and found to be large. Replacing a boss who is in the lower 10% of boss quality with one who is in the upper...

Knowledge based firms like IT companies do neither have a capital- nor a land intensive production. They predominantly rely on qualified labour and increasingly depend on the location of its (potential) employees. This implies that it is more likely that firms follow workers rather than the...

Why did productivity rise during recent recessions? One possibility is that average worker quality increased. A second is that each incumbent worker produced more. The second effect is termed “making do with less.” Using data from 2006 to 2010 on individual worker productivity from a large...

Motivated by the on-going interest of policy makers in the sources of job creation, this paper presents results from a new OECD project on the dynamics of employment (DynEmp) based on an innovative methodology using firm-level data (i.e. national business registers or similar sources). It...

We model the coordination of specialised tasks inside an organisation as "attribute matching". Using this method, we compare the performance of organisational forms (M-form and U-form) in implementing changes such as innovation and reform. In our framework, organisational forms affect the...

Theory predicts that optimal effective corporation tax rates will be negatively related to industry specific sunk costs, and hence industry concentration. Governments should tax industries with monopolistic power softly. Evidence suggests that this Schumpeterian (1942) principle of corporate...

This paper studies the effects of a country’s regulatory setting and competitive environment on the performance of second-generation (2G) mobile telecommunication. We consider three dimensions of sector performance: entry time, service prices and diffusion. We address the question of...

The digital industries cluster known as 'Silicon Roundabout' has been quietly growing in East London since the 1990s. Now rebranded 'Tech City', it is now the focus of huge public and government attention. National and local policymakers wish to accelerate the local area's development: such...

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