The measurement of bank output, a difficult and contentious issue, has become even more important in the aftermath of the devastating financial crisis of recent years. In this paper, we argue that models of banks as processors of information and transactions imply a quantity measure of bank...

Banks do not charge explicit fees for many of the services they provide but the service payment is bundled with the offered interest rates. This output therefore has to be imputed using estimates of the opportunity cost of funds. We argue that rather than using the single short-term, low-risk...

Relative productivity levels are used intensively in analyzing cross-country growth, but often based on crude measures and with little information on their reliability. In this paper, we provide a new framework to estimate purchasing power parities and productivity levels with associated...

Cross-country studies of economic growth have been hampered by the scarcity of reliable data on productivity at the sector level, see Bernard and Jones (AER, 2001) and Rogerson (JPE, 2008). We bring together literature on industry prices, human capital and capital assets to construct...

In this paper we introduce the GGDC Productivity Level database. This database provides comparisons of output, inputs and productivity at a detailed industry level for a set of thirty OECD countries. It complements the EU KLEMS growth and productivity accounts by providing comparative levels and...

This paper looks at several measures of competitiveness for the Japanese manufacturing sector relative to the United States over the period 1980-2000. Using industry-specific unit-value ratios (UVRs) we show that labour productivity in Japanese manufacturing lags considerably behind the U.S. and...

In this paper we present a new industry-level database to analyse sources of growth in four major European countries: France, Germany, Netherlands and United Kingdom (EU-4), in comparison with the United States for the period 1979-2000. Aggregate labour productivity growth is decomposed into...

This paper studies procyclical productivity growth at the industry level in the U.S. and in three European countries (France, Germany and the Netherlands). Industry-specific demand-side instruments are used to examine the prevalence of non-constant returns to scale and unmeasured input...

In this paper we asses whether productivity growth differentials between the U.S. and Europe in the distributive trade sector are real or mainly a statistical myth. New estimates of retail trade productivity are constructed, taking into account purchase prices of goods sold. We also adjust U.S....

When capital and labor are not allocated to the more productive firms, aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) suffers. Can this explain observed productivity differences across countries? We estimate manufacturing TFP levels for 52 developing countries and decompose it into a part due to...