This paper shows that the welfare of a country's representative consumer can be measured using just two variables: current and future total factor productivity and the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare differences...

We test the impact of import penetration on the productivity of a sample of roughly 35,000 Italian manufacturing firms operating in the period 1996-2003, considering the impact on productivity of both import penetration in the same industry and import penetration in the up-stream industries. We...

It has long been argued that cyclical fluctuations in labor and capital utilization and the presence of overhead labor and capital are important for explaining procyclical productivity. Here I present two simple and direct tests of these hypotheses, and a way of measuring the relative importance...