The 21st century global decline in productivity growth is not well understood. One possible contributor is a decline in economic dynamism. We explore the contribution of firm formation and employee movement to productivity using administrative data on the population of New Zealand construction...

The efficiency of common law rules is central to achieving efficient resource allocation in a market economy. While many theories suggest reasons why judge-made law should tend toward efficient rules, the question whether the common law actually does converge in commercial areas has remained...

The primary goal of our paper is to quantify the importance of imperfect competition in the U.S. construction industry by estimating the size of rents earned by American firms and workers. To obtain a comprehensive measure of the total rents and to understand its sources, we take into account...

This paper documents and examines the forces behind the decline of unionization in the construction industry. The proportion of construction workers belonging to unions has dropped from slightly less than one-half in 1966 to less than one-third in 1984. The employment share of union contractors...

Previous studies using micro data to estimate the impact of unions on productivity in construction in the early 1970's have found productivity to be higher for union than nonunion contractors in the private sector. The validity of these studies has been questioned in light of the declining...

This paper examines the effect of unions on efficiency by estimating cost function systems over three different sets of construction projects. The results show that union contractors have greater economies of scale. This gives them a cost advantage in large commercial office buildings, but in...

This paper estimates the effect of union work rules in the building trades on employment and costs by comparing factor demand elasticities for union and nonunion contractors and subcontractors over micro data from two different types of construction. The results show that the elasticities of...

According to unpublished data compiled by BLS, productivity in the construction industry reached a peak in 1968 and, except for a brief and small upturn between 1974 and 1976, has been falling ever since. This paper examines the sources of this productivity decline between 1968 and 1978 by...

This paper examines the difference in productivity between union and nonunion contractors in the construction industry over a sample of 83 commercial office buildings and another sample of 68 elementary and secondary schools. The popular belief that the building trades unions reduce productivity...

We examine the extent to which uncertainty delays investment and the effect of competition on this relationship using a sample of 1,214 condominium developments in Vancouver, Canada built from 1979-1998. We find that increases in both idiosyncratic and systematic risk lead developers to delay...