For more than fifty years, the Solow decomposition (Solow 1957) has served as the standard measurement of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in economics and management, yet little is known about its precision, especially when the capital stock is poorly measured. Using synthetic data...

We analyze a large stratified random sample of firms that provide us with measures ofperformance and each firm’s top manager’s perception of the severity of businessenvironment constraints faced by his/her firm. Unlike most existing studies that rely onexternal and aggregated proxy measures of...

We use panel data on Mexican manufacturing plants to study the connection between plants´responses to changes in the economic environment and their contributions to aggregateproductivity growth in the period following the implementation of the North American TradeAgreement (NAFTA)...

We prove that in a closed economy without distortionary taxation, the welfare of a representativeconsumer is summarized to a …rst order by the current and expected future values of the Solowproductivity residual in level and by the initial endowment of capital. The equivalence holds if...

In the literature technical change is mostly assumed to be exogenous and specified as afunction of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affecttechnical change. In this paper we model technical change via time trend (purely externalnon-economic) as well as other...

We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by thecurrent and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. Theequivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking pricesparametrically. This result justifies TFP...

We study the dispersion in rates of provincial economic- and TFP growth in China. Ourresults show that regional growth patterns can be understood as a function of severalinterrelated factors, which include investment in physical capital, human capital, andinfrastructure capital; the infusion of...

We study the dispersion in rates of provincial economic- and TFP growth in China. Our results show that regional growth patterns can be understood as a function of several interrelated factors, which include investment in physical capital, human capital, and infrastructure capital...

This paper estimates the impact of registering for taxes on firm profits in Bolivia, the countrywith the highest levels of informality in Latin America. A new survey of micro and small firmsenables us to control for a rich set of measures of owner ability and business motivations thatcan affect...

Few representative surveys of households of migrants exist, limiting our ability to study theeffects of international migration on sending families. We report the results of an experimentdesigned to compare the performance of three alternative survey methods in collecting datafrom...