Investments in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are the source of the global growth resurgence that commenced in the mid-1990s. Most studies focus on broad ICT measures, or on computer hardware; here we examine the contributions of software-intensive industries to productivity...

Employment protection affects aggregate productivity via several channels in potentially contradicting ways, which makes it difficult to establish the relationship between the two. This study focuses on the misallocation of production factors across plants, which has been shown in past studies...

The paper analyses whether business cycle fluctuations affect long-run growth. This hypothesis is tested using quarterly time series for the G7-countries. A vector-autoregressive model containing total factor productivity and a survey-based direct measure of the business cycle is estimated. In...

This paper explores the quantitative plausibility of three candidate explanations for the European productivity slowdown with respect to the US. The empirical plausibility of the common wisdom on the topic (the IT usageʺ hypothesis) is found to crucially depend on how IT-using industries are...

We review the recent performance of the Euro area economy, focusing in detail on the separate roles played by labour input, capital input and total factor productivity (TFP). After a long period of catching up with US levels of labour productivity, Euro area productivity growth has, since the...

This article studies how real exchange rate movements affect firm export behavior, using monthly data that cover the universe of Chinese export transactions over the period of 20002006. Specifically, we examine exchange rate effects on an exporter's extensive (entry, exit, and product churning)...

We present a set of empirical regularities that characterize the export activity of firms. We decompose firm-level exports by product category across destination markets in a consistent manner for four data sets from Brazil, Chile, Denmark, and Norway. We relate the empirical regularities to new...

Despite the controversy often surrounding retail sector liberalization, there little empirical evidence on the implications of such a reform. Using data from Romania, this study sheds light on what happens to the supplying industries after a country opens its retail sector to foreign direct...

This article reviews the US productivity growth experience over the last decade and discusses a set of issues that will likely impact productivity growth over the next decade. I begin by examining the evolving productivity picture since the early 1990s by looking at vintage data on actual...