The age-distribution of Europe's workforce has shifted towards older workers over the past few decades, a process expected to accelerate in the years ahead. This paper studies the effect of the aging of the workforce on labor productivity, identifies the main transmission channels, and examines...

This paper empirically assesses the role of structural and institutional reforms in driving productivity growth across countries at different stages of development, using a distance-to-frontier framework. It gauges whether particular policies and reforms matter more for increasing productivity...

Productivity growth in Italy has been persistently anemic and has lagged that of the euro area over the period 1999-2015, while the indebtedness of its corporate sector has increased. Using the ORBIS firm-level database, this paper studies the long-term impact of persistent corporate-debt...

We provide broad-based evidence of a firm size premium of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in Europe after the Global Financial Crisis. The TFP growth of smaller firms was more adversely affected and diverged from their larger counterparts after the crisis. The impact was progressively...

A surge of exports in the 2000s helped Japan exit the severe decade-long stagnation known as the lost decade. Using panel data of Japanese exporting firms, we examine the sources of the export surge during this period. One view argues that the so-called "divine wind" or exogenous external demand...

We study the role of financial frictions in explaining the sharp and persistent productivity growthslowdown in advanced economies after the 2008 global financial crisis. Using a rich cross-country,firm-level data set and exploiting quasi-experimental variation in firm-level exposure to the...

This paper estimates agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) in 162 countries between 1991 and 2015 and aims to understand sources of cross-country variations in agricultural TFP levels and its growth rates. Two factors affecting agricultural TFP are analyzed in detail - imported...

Analysis of firm-level panel data from three sub-Saharan African economies shows that exporting manufacturers have a total factor productivity premium of 11-28 percent. The data do not allow testing of whether these premiums are caused by selection of more efficient producers into exporting or...

This paper examines whether a tipping point exists for real GDP growth in Italy above which the ratio of non-performing loans (NPLs) to total loans falls significantly. Estimating a heterogeneous dynamic panel-threshold model with data on 17 Italian regions over the period 1997-2014, we provide...

This paper examines the role of removing obstacles to competition in product markets in raising growth and productivity. Using firm-level data from Italy during 2003-13 and OECD measures of product market regulation, we estimate the effect of deregulation in network sectors on value added and...