In a recent series of articles, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert W. Vishny have argued that countries whose legal systems are based on civil law (especially of French origin) have systematically weaker environments for business than those whose legal...

This paper develops a simple framework for understanding the emergence of new organizational forms, such as socially responsible firms and social entrepreneurs, that embody the private sector's efforts to resolve problems that typically have been within the purview of government and traditional...

We examine the role of the ICT revolution in driving productivity growth behavior for the United States and an aggregate of ten Western European nations (the EU-10) from 1977 to 2015. We find that the standard growth accounting approach is deficient when it separates sources of growth between...

In this paper we compare sources of economic growth in Japan and the United States from 1975 through 2003, focusing on the role of information technology (IT). We have adjusted Japanese data to conform to U.S. definitions in order to provide a rigorous comparison between the two economies. The...

This paper presents new data on the sources of growth for the Japanese economy over the period 1960- 2000. The principal innovation is the incorporation of detailed information for individual industries, including those involved in the production of computers, communications equipment, and...

This paper constructs a multi-sector model to take explicit account of the very sharp change in the relative price between non-IT and IT goods. The model is calibrated to the Japanese economy, and its solution path from 1990 on is compared to Japan's macroeconomic performance in the 1990s....

To identify the determinants of cross-country disparities in personal computer and Internet penetration, we examine a panel of 161 countries over the 1999-2001 period. Our candidate variables include economic variables (income per capita, years of schooling, illiteracy, trade openness),...

After fifty years of catching up to the United States level of productivity, since 1995 Europe has been falling behind. The growth rate in output per hour over 1995-2003 in Europe was just half that in the United States, and this annual growth shortfall caused the level of European productivity...

(1) Whatever happened to the cyclical effect? Skeptics were justified on the basis of data through the end of 1999 in their claim that part of the post-1995 productivity growth revival reflected the normal cyclical correlation between productivity and output growth. In contrast data through...

We argue that unmeasured investments in intangible organizational capital associated with the role of information and communications technology (ICT) as a general purpose technology' can explain the divergent U.S. and U.K. TFP performance after 1995. GPT stories suggest that measured TFP should...