Using a new data set that allows us to analyze precisely the research output in all fields of science, we show that the gap in scientific performance between Europe, especially continental Europe, and Anglo-Saxon countries, especially the USA, is large. We measure research quality by the number...

We study the effect of a large set of department characteristics on individual publication records. We control for many individual time-varying characteristics, individual fixed-effects and reverse causality. Department characteristics have an explanatory power that can be as high as that of...

This paper analyzes peer effects among university scientists. Specifically, it investigates whether the number of peers and their average quality affects the productivity of researchers in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The usual endogeneity problems related to estimating peer effects are...

Analysis of higher education quality has become a central issue in light of UK government policies to introduce variable fees and to encourage more and more young people to attend university. In this context, an important question is whether institutional quality is reflected in labour market...

Studies of firm-level data have shown that there is a huge dispersion of productivity across firms even when industries are narrowly defined. So there is a significant opportunity for the least productive firms to catch up to the most productive. The formers’ convergence could therefore...

There has been a remarkable increase in wage inequality in the US, UK and many other countries over the past three decades. A significant part of this appears to be within observable groups (such as age-gender-skill cells). A generally untested implication of many theories rationalizing the...

Optimal production decisions depend on local market characteristics. This paper develops a model to explain firm labor demand and firm density across regions. Firms vary in their technology to combine imperfectly substitutable worker types, and locate across regions with distinct distributions...

“The standard explanation of why advanced Europe has generated less work per adult than the US is that something is seriously amiss with EU labor markets. The theme of this piece is simple. Compared to an ideal competitive market, EU labor markets fall seriously short, but compared to labor...

Individual and household based aggregate measures of joblessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance if work is unequally distributed. This paper introduces a simple set of indices that can be used to measure the extent of divergence between individual and...

In this study we examine whether a workplace can induce good or bad attitudes among its employees and whether any such ¿workplace attitudes¿ affect economic outcomes. This study analyzes responses of thousands of employees working in nearly two hundred branches to the emp loyee opinion survey...