This paper investigates the time-varying relationship between German output and employment growth, in particular their decoupling in recent years. We estimate a correlated unobserved components model that allows for persistent and cyclical time variation in the employment-GDP linkage as well as...

The year 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of William J. Baumol’s seminal model of "unbalanced growth", which predicts the so-called "Growth Disease", i.e., the tendency of aggregate productivity growth to slow down in the process of tertiarisation. In an important contribution published in...

The private sector can be a strategic partner in the pursuit of sustainable and inclusive growth, with the ability to have a profound impact, particularly in areas such as climate change, inclusiveness, equality and good governance. Firms could contribute through three different approaches:...

Using sectoral intangible investment data we confirm that intangible capital is a significant determinant of labour productivity growth. The sectoral setting further allows us to identify the differential impacts of intangible capital across industries with varying degrees of ICT intensity....

Economists increasingly accept that social norms have powerful effects on human behavior and outcomes. In recent history, one norm widely adhered to in most developed nations has been for men to be the primary breadwinner within mixed-gender households. As women have entered the labor market in...

The US-centred debate on the decoupling of productivity from workers' compensation has given rise to the question whether this decoupling has also taken place in other countries, and if so, to what degree. However, in-depth analyses of the extent and the underlying causes of wage-productivity...

This paper analyses the endogeneity of euro area total factor productivity and its role in business cycle amplification by estimating a medium-scale DSGE model with endogenous productivity mechanism on euro area data. In this framework, total factor productivity evolves endogenously as a...

This paper provides evidence for a positive effect of total factor productivity growth on unemployment in cross-country regressions for OECD countries. The paper explains this empirical result with an exogenous growth model with unemployment due to unions and a CES production function with an...

Liberal think tanks claim that low growth in US wages is reducing incentives for labor-saving innovation and hence creating low labor productivity. Since conservatives reject this, a recent New York Times article stated that economists have a "chicken or egg problem" here. This paper uses modern...

Over the last decades, hours worked per capita have declined substantially in many OECD economies. Using the standard neoclassical growth model with endogenous work-leisure choice, we assess the role of trend growth slowdown in accounting for the decline in hours worked. In the model, a...