Despite massive digitization efforts, the German economy has experienced a marked slowdown in its productivity growth. This paper analyzes the reasons behind this disconcerting development. A major factor is the turnaround of the labor market that commenced around 2005. The successful...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...

To what extent have economies become better off because of the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT)? We analyze this question based on a growth accounting approach at the level of final output. This approach traces productivity improvements not within sectors but within...

This paper extends the literature on the determinants of international activity at the firm level towards cross-border acquisitions and greenfield investments as different modes of FDI using a rich dataset of British firms. While multinational firms are characterized by higher productivity...