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:...

The positive cross-country correlation between health and economic growth is well-established, but the underlying mechanisms are complex and difficult to discern. Three issues are of central concern. First, assessing and disentangling causality between health and economic growth is empirically...

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...

I propose a two-sector endogenous growth model with heterogeneous sectoral productivity and sector-specific, nonlinear hiring costs to analyse the link between sectoral resource allocation, low productivity growth and stagnant real wages. My results suggest that an upward shift in the labor...

Over the last decades, hours worked per capita have declined substantially in many OECD economies. Using a 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 permanent reduction...

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...