The Civil War resulted in a substantial divergence in the regional structure of factor prices. In particular, wages fell in the South relative to the non-South, but interest rates and other measures of the costs of capital increased. Using archival data for manufacturing establishments, we show...

We compute rates of growth in labor productivity during the 1973-80 period for samples of individual manufacturing firms, in both Japan and the U.S., and relate them to differences in the rates of growth in their capital-labor ratios and in their intensities of R&D effort. Japanese firms spent...

Both Research and Development (R&D) and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) investment have been identified as sources of relative innovation underperformance in Europe vis-à-vis the United States. In this paper we investigate R&D and ICT investment at the firm level in an effort to...

This paper examines the factors that give rise to intermediaries in exporting and explores the implications for trade volumes. Export intermediaries such as wholesalers serve different markets and export different products than manufacturing exporters. In particular, high market-specific fixed...

Innovation in SMEs exhibits some peculiar features that most traditional indicators of innovation activity do not capture. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a structural model of innovation which incorporates information on innovation success from firm surveys along with the usual Ramp;D...

The paper examines the size and productivity of total intangible capital relative to total tangible capital for a large panel of Italian Manufacturing firms. In the analysis, we decompose total intangibles in two different ways: in intangibles expensed in firms' current accounts (as usually...

We investigate the effects of female executives on gender-specific wage distributions and firm performance. We find that female leadership has a positive impact at the top of the female wage distribution and a negative impact at the bottom. Moreover, the impact of female leadership on firm...

Neglected, but significant, the long-run consequence of the minimum wage - which was made national policy in the United States in 1938 - is its stimulation of capital deepening. This took two forms. First, the engineered shortage of low-skill, low-paying jobs induced teenagers to invest in...

We estimate the wage effects of shared governance, or codetermination, in the form of a mandate of one third of corporate board seats going to worker representatives. We study a reformin Germany that abruptly abolished this mandate for stock corporations incorporated after August 1994, while it...