Mirroring the railroad industry of the 1940’s and 1950’s, the trucking industry today appearsto be achieving impressive productivity gains. But it is easy to confuse true productivityadvances in transportation industries with changes in ton-miles per unit of input that are duesimply to changes...

The UK’s poor productivity performance relative to the US has been a focus for government policy and analysis in recent Budgets and Pre-Budget Reports. Figure 1, where the UK business sector is scaled to 100, shows that US business sector labour productivity (value-added per worker) was just...

Im Durchschnitt waren die deutschen Lohnstückkosten 2021 um 13 Prozent höher als in den 27 Ländern des IW-Vergleichs und um 8 Prozent höher als im Euro-Ausland. Die hierzulande überdurchschnittlich hohe Produktivität der Industrie reichte nicht aus, um den Nachteil der hohen Arbeitskosten...

This paper investigates the productivity effects of inward and outward foreign direct investment using industry and country level data for 17 OECD countries over the period 1973 to 2001. Controlling for national and international knowledge spillovers we argue that effects of FDI work through...

Embedding the efficient bargaining model into the R. Hall (1988) approach for estimating price-cost margins shows that both imperfections in the product and labor markets generate a wedge between factor elasticities in the production function and their corresponding shares in revenue. This...

Our paper adds empirical evidence on the causal effects of exporting on firms' performances. Using a rich database on Italian manufacturing firms, we test the self-selection and the post-entry effects hypotheses with respect to various firms' characteristics. Our analysis supports the idea that...

This paper provides a description of the production process by comparing different frameworks in which to analyze the relations between inputs and output. The analyses are performed on a representative sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We employ both parametric and non-parametric analysis....

This paper explores how firms' skills and organizational change affect the returns from investments in ICT. Our work contributes to the literature by testing the hypothesis of complementarity in a panel of 540 Italian manufacturing firms during 1995-2000. By drawing on different statistical...

In the paper, productivity convergence is analyzed with a broad panel of industry sector data for the United States and Germany for 1960-1990. The time-series/cross-sectoral data set allows to investigate country-specific convergence, and to control for sector-specific differences in human...

Based on a panel data set of Japanese manufacturing firms in research-intensive industries, we investigate quantitatively the extent to which debt outstandings in the 90s affected the firm's R&D activities. We find that massive debt outstandings had significantly negative effect on R&D...