Twenty years have passed since Freeman and Medoff's What Do Unions Do? This essay assesses their analysis of how unions in the U.S. private sector affect economic performance - productivity, profitability, investment, and growth. Freeman and Medoff are clearly correct that union productivity...

Is time-varying firm-level uncertainty a major cause or amplifier of the business cycle? This paper investigates this question in the context of a heterogeneousfirm RBC model with persistent firm-level productivity shocks and lumpy capital adjustment, where cyclical changes in uncertainty...

Using a unique German firm-level data set, this paper is the first to jointly study the cyclical properties of the cross-sections of firm-level real value added and Solow residual innovations, as well as capital and employment adjustment. We find two new business cycle facts: 1) The...

There is a common perception that low productivity or low growth is due to what can be called an `innovation shortfall,` usually identified as a low rate of investment in research and development (RD) compared with some high-innovation countries. The usual reaction to this perceived problem is...

In the paper, the sources of productivity growth are investigated by an empirical analysis with micro data for West-German manufacturing firms. The theoretical framework corresponds to an augmented growth accounting approach based on a production function. The empirical results reveal that...

This paper analyses the effects of price and market size variables on the investment propensities in the pulp and paper industry. A panel of 15 European countries in the time period 1984 - 1997 is used in the regression analysis. We find the wages, the US/ECU exchange rate, the price of paper...

The EU candidate and potential candidate countries have made considerable progress in economic transition and integration into the world economy within less than two decades. Nevertheless, gaps in terms of income per capita relative to the euro area remain large. This suggests that the...

Over the twentieth century, Canada's energy, forestry, and mining industries played a substantial and increasing role in the growth and development of the aggregate economy. Despite the improving fundamentals that were underlying their increased contributions to the size, capital intensity, and...

Das Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung der Bundesagentur für Arbeit (IAB) führt seit 1996 jährlich eine Arbeitgeberbefragung in ostdeutschen Betrieben durch (IAB-Betriebspanel Ost). Im Sommer 2003 fand diese Befragung zum achten Mal statt, um aktuelle repräsentative Daten über...