A recent survey of 54 micro-econometric studies reveals that exporting firms are more productive than non-exporters. On the other hand, previous empirical studies show that exporting does not necessarily improve productivity. One possible reason for this result is that most previous studies are...

Conventional pension systems suffer from a design defect which makes them financially unsustainable, and a source of inefficiency for the economy as a whole. The paper outlines a second-best policy which includes a public pension system made up of two parallel schemes, a Bismarckian one allowing...

The present paper uses a combination of workplace and linked employee-workplace data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey and the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey to examine the impact of unions on training incidence, training intensity/coverage, and training duration. It...

This paper investigates the connection between firm entry and exit and labour productivity growth. The study has its theoretical foundations in modern Schumpeterian growth theory, distance to frontier model and vintage capital models. The importance of productivity enhancing restructuring has...

We analyse the effect of workforce composition by birthplace in Austrian firms on workers' wages. In our model, each worker's productivity may depend on whether the co-workers are of the same or of a different birthplace and wages depend therefore both on the relative size of workers' groups as...

We implement an endogeneous switching-regression model for labour productivity and firms' decision to use business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. Our approach allows B2B usage to affect any parameter of the labour productivity equation and to properly take account of strategic complementarities...

The distribution of labour productivity is investigated by analyzing the longitudinal micro-level data set which contains detailed financial condition of large numbers of Japanese companies over the period 1996--2006. The generalized beta function of the second kind is applied to explain the...

The distribution of labour productivity is investigated by analyzing the longitudinal micro-level data set which contains the detailed financial conditions of large numbers of Japanese companies over the period 1996-2006. The authors show that the distribution of labour productivity in both the...

Conventional pension systems suffer from a design defect which makes them financially unsustainable, and a source of inefficiency for the economy as a whole. The paper outlines a second-best policy which includes a public pension system made up of two parallel schemes, a Bismarckian one allowing...

Global climate change will increase outdoor and indoor heat loads, and may impair health and productivity for millions of working people. This study applies physiological evidence about effects of heat, climate guidelines for safe work environments, climate modelling and global distributions of...