Public funding drives much of the recent growth of college degree supply in Europe, but few indicators are available to assess its optimal level. In this paper, we investigate an indicator of college skills usage - the fraction of college graduates employed in "college" occupations. Gottschalk...

Labor productivity - output per hour worked - is an important factor determining the wealth of national economies and their standards of living. Its growth accounts for about half of per capita GDP growth in OECD countries. Despite its importance, it has received scant attention in political...

Technological change is transforming Ireland’s economic structures, leading to new jobs and innovative products that benefit consumers. Adoption of new technologies by businesses has been high relative to many other OECD economies, but it has been uneven across industries and the impact on...

A new wave of innovation is beginning to disrupt industry on a global scale. It constitutes a tremendous opportunity for faster productivity growth, but also a potential disruption to a number of economic sectors and to job markets. Academic research and the public debate have focused mostly on...

The wave of digital-industrial innovation which begins to disrupt vast sectors of the global economy has fueled fear of a potential adverse impact on jobs and wages. This paper argues that digitalindustrial innovations make human capital more important than ever and the focus needs to shift to...

Skills, innovation and human capital as they feature prominently on the policy agenda of industrialized countries concerned with productivity and competitiveness issues. Not surprisingly, formal education is the preferred and most conventional policy instrument of governments in pursuing these...

Many of the policies that fall under the school accountability umbrella are designed to incentivize students. Prominent among these are high school exit exams, standardized tests that, in some states, students must pass to earn a high school diploma. Proponents of these tests argue that by...

The author argues that productivity should be raised by bringing the low productivity segment of the workforce closer to the median. Consequently, he argues that the most pressing task for Canadians is to foster basic skills, reduce the high school dropout rate, and raise the profile of...

The economic success story of the 1990s has been Ireland, with GDP per capita nearly doubling over the decade. In this article Pierre Fortin from the Université du Québec à Montréal and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research provides a detailed examination of the factors behind the...

This study examines the relation between corporate tax avoidance and firm-level productivity. Using a sample of U.S.-listed firms from 1994 to 2017, we show that, ceteris paribus, greater tax avoidance leads to increased productivity. Consistent with the ''funding gap'' of innovative investments...