This Paper studies the inter-temporal problem of a monopolistic firm that engages in productivity-enhancing innovations to reduce its labour costs. If the level of wages is sufficiently low, the firm's rate of productivity growth approaches the rate of wage growth and eventually the firm reaches...

This paper estimates the degree of the returns to scale for 2-digit U.S. manufacturing industries from the output-based primal and price-based dual equations implied by firms' cost-minimization problems. It seeks to reconcile the cyclical behavior of the primal and dual productivity residuals by...

In a recent report (IC 1995a) the Industry Commission (IC) estimates that the implementation of the Hilmer Report and related reforms will yield a GDP gaim of around 5.4 per cent. In this paper, assumption are subject to a detailed critique. It is argued that most of the estimated productivity...

Using two matched plant level skills and productivity datasets for UK manufacturing we document that (i) more productive firms hire more skilled workers: in 2000, plants at the top decile of the TFP distribution (controlling for their four-digit industry) hired workers with, on average, around...

Is entrepreneurial talent entirely innate or do people learn to become entrepreneurs? We extend Lucas's (1978) model of entrepreneurship to allow for the possibility that entrepreneurial talents may be acquired by watching other entrepreneurs in action. This model implies that areas with a...

This Paper uses a unique representative firm level data set to analyse the effect of domestic and international competitive pressure and ownership changes in three emerging economies, Bulgaria Poland and Romania. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: Domestic competitive pressure,...

While transport costs have fallen, the empirical evidence also points at rising total trade costs. In a model of industry location with endogenous transaction costs, we show how and under which conditions a decline in transport costs can lead to an increase in the total cost of trade.

By extrapolating Gordon’s (1990) measures of the quality-bias in the official price indexes, we construct quality-adjusted price indexes for 24 types of equipment and software (E&S) from 1947 to 2000 and use them to measure technical change at the aggregate and at the industry level....

We study the relation between workers' skill dispersion and firm productivity using a unique dataset of Italian manufacturing firms from the early eighties to the late nineties with individual records on all their workers. Our measure of skill is the individual worker's effect obtained as a...

This paper provides three perspectives on long-run growth rates of labor productivity (LP) and of multi-factor productivity (MFP) for the U. S. economy. It extracts statistical growth trends for labor productivity from quarterly data for the total economy going back to 1952, provides new...