This paper uses a unique dataset of both public and private sector primary school teachers and their students to present among the first estimates in a low-income country of (a) teacher effectiveness; (b) teacher value added (TVA) and its correlates; and (c) the link between TVA and teacher...

Is a five-day workweek followed by a two-day weekend a socially optimal schedule? This paper presents a model in which labor productivity and the marginal utility of leisure evolve endogenously over the workweek. Labor productivity is shaped by two forces: restfulness, which decreases over the...

Drawing on a new set of nationally representative, internationally comparable household surveys, this paper provides an overview of key features of structural transformation?labor allocation and labor productivity?in four African economies. New, micro-based measures of sector labor allocation...

This paper uses a large national household panel from 1999/2000 and 2007/08 to analyze the short-term effects of India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme on wages, labor supply, agricultural labor use, and productivity. The scheme prompted a 10-point wage increase and...

The authors follow the Hellerstein, Neumark, and Troske (1999) framework to estimate marginal productivity differentials and compare them with estimated relative wages. The analysis provides evidence on productivity and nonproductivity-based determinations of wages. Special emphasis is given to...

This paper examines the role of changes in sectoral productivity gaps over time in accounting for growth realized by countries over the past few decades. To quantify the productivity impact of the sectoral gaps, a simple model of resource allocation is developed in which the gaps arise due to...

This paper provides evidence on the effects of agricultural productivity on wage rates, labor supply to market oriented activities, and labor allocation between own farming and wage labor in agriculture. To guide the empirical work, this paper develops a general equilibrium model that...

This paper tests whether structural or firm-specific characteristics contributed more to (labor) productivity growth in the European Union between 2003 and 2008. It combines the Amadeus firm-level data on productivity and firm characteristics with country-level data describing regulatory...

Using firm-level survey data on registered private firms collected by the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this paper compares the level of labor productivity in 22 upper-middle-income countries and 11 high-income countries for which comparable data are available. The results show that labor...

This paper explores the impact of the adoption of information and communications technology on firm performance and labor market outcomes using a firm survey from the manufacturing sector in Argentina. The findings are that at the firm level adoption of information and communications technology...