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...

We investigate labor productivity dynamics amongst British businesses in the wake of the credit crisis of 2007/8. The external restructuring of firms (i.e. changes in market share, firm entry and exit) contributed to a fall in productivity growth relative to trend amongst small businesses in...

This paper investigates whether there is convergence in Total Factor Productivity towards the technological frontier at the establishment level. We find convergence to the frontier is statistically and quantitatively important, suggesting the existence of technology spillovers. Foreign...

Should raising the growth rate of GDP per capita be a policy goal of governments in general, and of the British government in particular? Many people would say no, for the following reasons: 1) GDP is hopelessly flawed as a measure of welfare; 2) Growing GDP is pointless since most people don’t...

When doing growth accounting, should we use ex post or ex ante measures of user costs to calculate the contribution of capital? The answer, based on a simple model of temporary equilibrium, is that ex post is better in theory. In practice researchers usually calculate ex post user costs by...

The May 2007 issue of the Journal of Monetary Economics published a paper of mine entitled ‘Investment-Specific Technological Progress and Growth Accounting’ which critiqued the work of Greenwood, Hercowitz and Krusell. I argued that the Greenwood-Hercowitz-Krusell (GHK) model is a special...

We revisit Western Europe’s record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and...

At the Lisbon summit of 2000 the European Union (EU) set an agenda for making Europe the most competitive economy in the world. The targets that were set then are unlikely to be achieved. European countries need to concentrate on change in the lower productivity, more labour-intensive service...

This paper examines the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity, paying particular attention to two issues neglected in the existing literature – the role of multinationals in service sectors and the importance of R&D activity conducted by foreign multinationals. We review...

We use a new industry-level dataset to quantify the role of ICT in explaining productivity growth in the UK, 1970-2000. The dataset is for 34 industries covering the whole economy (31 in the market sector). Using growth accounting, we find that ICT capital played an increasingly important, and...