Persistently rising energy prices have revived interest in the economic impact of changing energy costs. We explore the effects of these costs on sectoral change, particularly in relation to the rise and future prospects of the "service economy". Following Baumol's cost disease hypothesis,...

To what extent has input reallocation contributed to aggregate productivity growth in the banking sectors of Europe and the United States? Interestingly, under-performing banks capture market share, while more productive banks lose market share, in particular in the US. The pattern of...

International trade economists typically assume that there are no cross-country differences in industry total factor productivity (TFP). In contrast, this paper finds large and persistent TFP differences across a group of industrialized countries in the 1980s. The paper calculates TFP indices,...

A recent explanation for declining GDP growth is that R&D has gotten harder. The formal explanation in Jones (1995) is “fishing out”-- idea discovery decreases in the level of knowledge. If valid, long-run growth is exogenous. In follow-on empirical work, Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen and Webb...

Average weekly working hours in most industrialized economies have displayed steady declines since the 1970s. Changes in working hours may have two contrasting effects on hourly productivity: a "fatigue effect" and a "learning effect." An increase in working hours may lead to the accumulation of...

This paper quantifies the contribution of human capital accumulation to the growth of real gross domestic product (GDP) in Canada. GDP growth is decomposed into contributions from physical capital, hours worked, human capital supplied per hour and total factor productivity. Using a "flat spot"...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of decoupling economic growth and energy use and its various determinants by exploring trends in energy- and labour productivity across 10 manufacturing sectors and 14 OECD countries for the period 1970-1997. We explicitly aim to trace back aggregate...

Applications tend to ignore that measured TFP reflects the variation of output that cannot be explained by changes in inputs. Such a change is not necessarily technological, so measured TFP differences across firms are an amalgam of technological, efficiency and other differences in attributes,...

We present in this paper the panel econometrics estimation approach of measuring the technical change and total factor productivity (TFP) growth of 30 Chinese provinces during the period of 1993 to 2003. The random effects model with heteroscedastic variances has been used for the estimation of...

Using Solow-Törnqvist residuals as well as two alternative measurements, we present estimates of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in a sample of 30 European economies for the period 1994-2005. In most of Western Europe, we find a deceleration of TFP growth since 2000. However, the...