In this chapter by Janice Stein warns about the dangers of adopting a narrow conception of productivity and efficiency. Building on her analysis in The Cult of Efficiency, she argues that the language of efficiency, understood narrowly as cost-effectiveness, confronts distinctive problems when...

Gross domestic product (GDP) per adult in Canada fluctuated between 70% and 90% of that of the United States between 1960 and 2020. Behind this gap lie large, systematic differences in relative incomes across the Canadian and US income distributions. There are small differences in average...

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"...

In this paper, we offer a unique firm-level view of the empirical regularities underlying the evolution of the Lithuanian economy over the period of 2000-2014. Employing a novel dataset, we investigate key distributional moments of real and financial variables of Lithuanian firms. We focus in...

Using a large-scale real effort experiment, we explore whether and how different peer assignment mechanisms affect worker performance and stress. Letting individuals choose whom to compare to increases productivity to the same extent as a targeted exogenous matching policy aimed at maximizing...

Speculative news on corporate takeovers may hurt productivity because uncertainty and threat of job loss cause anxiety, distraction, and reduced collaboration and morale among employees and managers. Using a panel of OECD-headquartered firms, we show that firm productivity temporarily declines...

How worker productivity evolves with tenure and experience is central to economics, shaping, for example, life-cycle earnings and the losses from involuntary job separation. Yet, worker-level productivity is hard to identify from observational data. This paper introduces direct measurement of...

Data collected with the Finnish Management and Organizational Practices Survey (FMOP) is used to study the association between management practices and firm productivity, and to examine whether human capital intensity acts as a moderator variable for this relationship. A comparison of how well...

Using linked employer-employee data from Finland, we examine the mobility of workers between establishments as a source of productivity-affecting knowledge spillovers. We find evidence that hiring workers from more productive establishments leads to higher productivity in the following year. For...

This paper investigates the indirect economic impact of tuberculosis epidemic in one of the high-burden countries, focusing on the productivity at the individual level measured by the average wages and at firm level measured by the average total factor productivity (TFP). We use unique...