Although it is well known that Markov process theory, frequently applied in the literature on income convergence, imposes some very restrictive assumptions upon the data generating process, these assumptions have generally been taken for granted so far. The present paper proposes, resp. recalls...

We test a New Economic Geography (NEG) model for U.S. counties, employing a new strategy that allows us to bring the full NEG model to the data, and to assess selected elements of this model separately. We find no empirical support for the full NEG model. Regional wages in the U.S. do not...

We estimate the relative roles of factor inputs and productivity in explaining the level of economic development, which is measured as output per worker. For a large sample of countries, we show that alternative identifying productivity assumptions and alternative measures of human capital have...

The growth rate of total factor productivity seems to have increased recently, at least in the United States. Higher US productivity growth may justify higher stock market valuations than in the past and thus herald an emerging New Economy. However, the size of the estimated growth rate of total...

Countries with the highest labor productivity overwhelmingly lie in the world's temperate climatic zones far away from the equator. The question we address is whether climatic conditions as measured by distance from the equator remain correlated with labor productivity after other variables are...

This paper addresses the question of why prolonged regional unemployment differentials tend to persist even after their proximate causes have been reversed (e.g., after wages in the highunemployment regions have fallen relative to those in the low-unemployment regions). We suggest that the...

We document three changes in postwar US macroeconomic dynamics: (i) the procyclicality of labor productivity has vanished, (ii) the relative volatility of employment has risen, and (iii) the relative (and absolute) volatility of the real wage has risen. We propose an explanation for all three...

This paper outlines a simple regression-based method to decompose the variance of an aggregate time series into the variance of its components, which is then applied to measure the relative contributions of productivity, hours per worker, and employment to cyclical output growth across a panel...