The labour productivity differentials between manufacturing firms in Ghana and South Korea exceed those implied by macro analysis.  Median value-added per employee is nearly 40 times higher in South Korea than Ghana.  The most important single factor in explaining this difference is the...

A large majority of the labour force were manual workers in 1960.  As voters, they had electoral power to pursue collective goods.  As producers they were able to disrupt production.  The majority left school with no qualifications.  Their human capital consisted of skills specific to...

The growth process for a technological leader is different from that of a follower. While followers can grow through imitation and capital deepening, a leader must undertake original research. This suggests that as the gap between the leader and the follower narrows, the follower must undertake...

After a dramatic slowdown of the 1970s, productivity growth in UK manufacturing in the 1980s returned to something like its pre-slowdown trend. This paper constructs a quarterly dynamic model of TFP growth in UK manufacturing using cointegration techniques, correcting for a variety of...

Analysis of new comparable series on output and employment between 1900 and 2000 for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela indicates that productivity growth was significantly higher and less volatile during the middle decades of the century than in the opening and closing...

The existing literature on training is concerned with understanding the reasons why firms pay for the general skills of their workers, but without explaining which firms train which workers. This paper develops a theory that both explains the willingness of firms to pay for general training, and...

An increasingly important organisational design problem for many firms is to recoup general human capital rents while maintaining attractive career prospects for workers. We explore the role of information management in this context. In our model, an information management policy determines the...

Does emigration really drain human capital accumulation in origin countries? This paper explores a unique household survey designed and conducted to answer this specific question for the case of Cape Verde - the sub-Saharan African country with the largest fraction of tertiary-educated...

The paper estimates cross-province growth regressions for China over the period of economic reform.  It first addresses the problem of model uncertainty by adopting two approaches to model selection, Bayesian Model Averaging and the automated General-to-Specific approach, to consider a wide...

During the past decade or so empirical literature on comparative development of nations has turned to investigation of "deep" or determinants of productivity and capital intensity, such as institutions, trade, geography and human capital.  In this paper I revisit this debate and make three...