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...

We estimate the effects of a mandate allocating a third of corporate board seats to workers (shared governance). We study a reform in Germany that abruptly abolished this mandate for certain firms incorporated after August 1994 but locked it in for the older cohorts. In sharp contrast to the...

Neglected, but significant, the long-run consequence of the minimum wage - which was made national policy in the United States in 1938 - is its stimulation of capital deepening. This took two forms. First, the engineered shortage of low-skill, low-paying jobs induced teenagers to invest in...

The Civil War resulted in a substantial divergence in the regional structure of factor prices. In particular, wages fell in the South relative to the non-South, but interest rates and other measures of the costs of capital increased. Using archival data for manufacturing establishments, we show...

Using confidential individual firm data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis survey of U.S. firms' manufacturing operations abroad, we investigate the determinants of capital intensity in affiliate operations. Host country labor cost, the scale of host country production, and the capital...

In this paper we develop a theory of how factors interact at the plant level. The theory has implications for: (1) the micro foundations for capital skill complementarity (2) the relationship between factor allocation and plant size and (3) the effects of trade and growth on the skill premium....

This paper analyzes effects of population aging on the labor market and determines their broad implications for public policy. It takes Germany as an example, but it equally applies to the other large economies in Continental Europe. The paper argues that, alongside the amply discussed,...

The decline in the U.S. labor share is far from uniform across firms. While the aggregate labor share has declined, especially in manufacturing, retail, and wholesale, the labor share of a typical firm in these industries has risen. This paper studies the dynamics of the substitution of capital...

A growing body of empirical work has documented the superior performance characteristics" of exporting plants and firms relative to non-exporters. Employment, shipments and capital intensity are all higher at exporters at any given moment. This paper asks whether good" firms become exporters or...

This paper embeds variable effort into a traditional multi-sector model. Effort enters a production function like total-factor-productivity and on the assumption that effort doesn't affect capital depreciation, the capital-cost savings from high effort operations are passed on to workers. The...