Recent work linking the adoption of key organizational practices to productivity raises an important question: if adoption increases productivity so dramatically, why does adoption across an industry take so long? This paper explores this question in the context of one particularly interesting...

In this paper, we use a French matched employer-employee survey, the COI survey, conducted in 1997, to describe the general features of organizational change in manufacturing firms with more than 50 employees. In a first section, we explore the methodological issues associated with the building...

The local academic science base plays a dominant role in determining where and when biotechnology is adopted by existing firms or -- much more frequently -- exploited by new entrants in the U.S. In Japan this new dominant technology has almost exclusively been introduced through organizational...

One of the productive activities engaging the work force is reorganizing. When factors of production are better matched, productivity is higher. The probabilistic matching model of Diamond, Mortensen, and others provides a way to make the idea of reorganization precise. Because the flow of...

In this paper we analyze the evolution of the Mexican economy between 1995 and 1998. The remarkable quick recovery seen in aggregate activity has not been uniform across the economy. The tradable sector has grown strongly, while the non-tradable sector has recuperated only sluggishly. This...

In principle, firms in developing countries benefit from the fact that advanced technologies and products have already been developed in industrialized countries and can simply be adopted, a process often referred to as industrial upgrading. But for many firms this advantage remains elusive....