The slower productivity growth in Canada relative to that experienced in the United States in the second half of the 1990s has been a matter of great concern to Canadians, with a wide variety of explanations put forward to account for this development. A key issue is whether this slower...

The fourth issue of the International Productivity Monitor produced by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains five articles. Topics covered are: recent productivity developments in the United States and Canada and implications for the Canada-U.S. productivity and income gaps; the...

We analyze cross-country trends in technological progress over the period of 1980-2011 by examining citations data from almost 4 million utility patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Our estimation results on patent quality and distance to the knowledge frontier reveal...

In sections one to three of this paper, we interrogate the relatively new Irish policy concept of the ‘smart economy' by relating and comparing it to recent theories engaging with the characteristics of the changing industrial economy. This summary review includes concepts such as New Economy,...

The present paper aims to acquaint concisely about the principal concerns surrounding the theme immigration, founded in the literature. This acquaintance is ensured through first (comprising the first part of the corpus) a global view drawing the portrait of immigrants – by focusing on three...

Exploiting a novel geo-referenced data set of population diversity across ethnic groups, this research advances the hypothesis and empirically establishes that variation in population diversity across human societies, as determined in the course of the exodus of human from Africa tens of...

This paper aims to enrich the standard toolbox for measuring diversity in economics. In so doing, we compare the indicators of diversity used by economists with those used by biologists and ecologists. Ecologists and biologists are concerned about biodiversity: the diversity of organisms that...

Cross-country differences in homeownership rates are large and persistent over time, with homeownership rates ranging from 40% in Switzerland to 80% in Spain. This paper investigates whether culture is a driving factor of the homeownership decision, and could thus explain part of the...