We use tailored surveys and benchmarking in the flat-weave rug industry to better understand the shortcomings of standard productivity measures. TFPQ performs poorly because of variation in product specifications across firms. Controlling for specifications aligns TFPQ with lab benchmarks. We...

Audit studies testing for discrimination have been criticized because applicants from different groups may not appear identical to employers. Correspondence studies address this criticism by using fictitious paper applicants whose qualifications can be made identical across groups. However,...

The identification of age, cohort (vintage), and period (year) effects in a panel of individuals or other units is an old problem in the social sciences, but one that has not been much studied in the context of measuring researcher productivity. In the context of a semi-parametric model of...

What determines the earnings of a worker relative to his peers in the same occupation? What makes a worker fail in one occupation but succeed in another? More broadly, what are the factors that determine the productivity of a worker-occupation match? To help answer questions like these, we...

According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the non-agricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, and particularly so in developing countries. Taken at face value, this "agricultural productivity gap" suggests that labor is greatly misallocated...

In this paper I use data from a survey of firms to estimate the effects of a firm's wage level on several measures of its hiring costs and the characteristics and performance of its employees. These measures include the previous experience and current tenure of its employees; subjective...

There are two obvious possibilities that can account for the rise in productivity during recent recessions. The first is that the decline in the workforce was not random, and that the average worker was of higher quality during the recession than in the preceding period. The second is that each...

This study analyzes the impact of major industrial relations variables on productivity within a plant that assembles large commercial aircraft. The analysis combines the deep firm- specific knowledge of management and labor typical of the best of traditional industrial relations with formal...