This paper examines the effects of alternative specifications of the user costs of capital on the estimated price and volume indices of capital services. It asks how sensitive the results are to the use of exogenous versus endogenous rates of return, to alternate ways of including capital gains,...

This paper employs the databases that are used to construct Statistics Canada's Productivity Accounts to examine the sources of growth in the Canadian economy and the history of productivity growth in Canada over the period 1961 to 2002. It makes use of a new time series using the North American...

This paper examines the challenges that the manufacturing sector has faced over the last half century - focusing on both long- and short-term performance. It first examines whether there is evidence that this sector is in long-term decline. The paper also investigates how the industry has...

Baldwin and Gu (2008) provide an overview of the productivity program at Statistics Canada and a brief description of Canada's productivity performance. This paper provides an update of Canada's productivity performance in more recent years and analyses the sources of weak productivity...

A number of studies have found that firms provide less training if they are located in regions with strong labor market competition. This finding is usually interpreted as evidence of a higher risk of poaching in these regions. Yet, there is no direct evidence that regional competition is...

This paper analyses the risk of unemployment, unemployment duration and the risk of long-term unemployment immediately after apprenticeship graduation. Unemployed apprenticeship graduates constitute a large share of unemployed youth in Germany but unemployment incidence within this group is...

This paper addresses the puzzle how employers that invest in general human capital can gain an information advantage with respect to the ability of their employees when training is certified by credible external institutions. We apply an established model from the employer-learning literature...

This paper is one of the first attempts at empirically identifying organisational capabilities - in this work concerning Italian firms. Together, it proposes new evidence on the link between capabilities and economic performances. In order to do so, we employ the Indagine Multiscopo del...