This paper examines patterns of structural change and labour productivity growth in the late nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire. Using shift-share analysis and a set of basic measures to account for the contribution of physical and human capital growth, it seeks to address three questions:...

Theory predicts that mandated employment protections may reduce productivity by distortingproduction choices. Firms facing (non-Coasean) worker dismissal costs will curtail hiringbelow efficient levels and retain unproductive workers, both of which should affectproductivity. These theoretical...

US labor productivity in ICT-skill intensive industries experienced tremendousincreases in post-1995 trend growth compared to Germany, while other (non-ICT-skillintensive) industries showed similar growth trends in both countries. Examining thesource of industry productivity growth in German...

We study how workers' wages respond to TFP-driven innovations in firms' labor productivity. Using unique data with highly reliable firm-level output prices and quantities in the manufacturing sector in Sweden, we are able to derive measures of physical (as opposed to revenue) TFP to instrument...

Mirroring the railroad industry of the 1940's and 1950's, the trucking industry today appears to be achieving impressive productivity gains. But it is easy to confuse true productivity advances in transportation industries with changes in ton-miles per unit of input that are due simply to...

This paper assess determinants of productivity gaps between firms in the European transition countries and regions and firms in West Germany. The analysis is conducted at the firm level by use of a unique database constructed by field work. The determinants tested in a simple econometric...

This study describes the state of the art in the measurement of intangible capital and its contribution to economic growth, with a focus on an international comparison of intangible investment intensity and intangible capital deepening among eleven advanced economies. By employing a broad...

This paper analyzes the implications of labor market institutions and policies on the employment-labor productivity trade-off. We consider an equilibrium search model with wage posting and specific human capital investment where unemployment and the distribution of both wages and productivity...

This paper outlines a simple regression-based method to decompose the variance of an aggregate time series into the variance of its components, which is then applied to measure the relative contributions of productivity, hours per worker, and employment to cyclical output growth across a panel...

The growth rate of total factor productivity seems to have increased recently, at least in the United States. Higher US productivity growth may justify higher stock market valuations than in the past and thus herald an emerging New Economy. However, the size of the estimated growth rate of total...