We compute rates of growth in labor productivity during the 1973-80 period for samples of individual manufacturing firms, in both Japan and the U.S., and relate them to differences in the rates of growth in their capital-labor ratios and in their intensities of R&D effort. Japanese firms spent...

This paper compares and analyzes the growth of productivity in the manufacturing industries and firms in France and the U.S. based on newly assembled comparable data sets in both countries. Three explanations of the recent productivity slowdown are reviewed: shortfall in physical investment,...

In this paper we derive a model of aggregate investment that builds from the lumpy microeconomic behavior of firms facing stochastic fixed adjustment costs. Instead of the standard (S,s) bands, firms' optimal adjustment policies are probabilistic, with a probability of adjusting (adjustment...

This paper investigates the shift in demand towards skilled labor in U.S. manufacturing. Between 1979 and 1989. employment of production workers in manufacturing dropped by 2.2 mil1ion or 15 percent while employment of non-production workers rose by 3 percent. A decomposition of changing...

This paper develops a method for joint estimation of both the degree of internal returns to scale and the extent of external economies. We apply the method in estimating returns to scale indexes for U.S. manufacturing industries at the two-digit level. Overall, we find that only three of the...

Even before the Great Recession, U.S. employment growth was unimpressive. Between 2000 and 2007, the economy gave back the considerable gains in employment rates it had achieved during the 1990s, with major contractions in manufacturing employment being a prime contributor to the slump. The U.S....

An increasingly influential "technological-discontinuity" paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using U.S. manufacturing industries. There is some...