Improving productivity among microenterprises is important, especially in low-income countries where market imperfections are pervasive, and resources are scarce. Relaxing credit constraints can increase the productivity of microenterprises. Using a field experiment involving agricultural...

This paper demonstrates the causal effect of new technologies on the U.S. labor market. I employ information and communications technology, and robot penetration, as two proxy for new technologies to assess the effect of automation on 795 occupations across 450 industries between 2004 and 2016....

The objective of this paper is to identify determinants of the reductions in the use of labor observed in Argentine agriculture. The paper focuses on the 2002-2018 period, using data from the last two publications of the Censo Nacional Agropecuario (the census undertaken in 2008 is incomplete)....

Over the years, a large number of indexes of technological inefficiency have been specified, and a spate of papers has examined the properties satisfied by these indexes. This paper approaches the subject more synthetically, presenting generic results on classes of indexes and their properties....

The development process and technological improvements since the industrial revolution are characterized by substantial increases in the quantity and variety of tools/machines/materials adopted in production. It is difficult to reject empirically that proliferation of tools variety is the...

This paper provides new evidence on the main characteristics of laggard firms - firms in the bottom 40% of the productivity distribution - and their potential for productivity growth. It finds that laggards are on average younger and smaller than more productive firms, and matter for aggregate...

Available data on production parameters of the newly born Arabian Gulf countries are very scarce. Truly, they are extremely rich with their oil and natural gas reserves. However, it is basic in an economy to generate other sources of income from created economic sectors. In the present study I...

The current paper reviews the impacts and effects of technical transfer and change on the economic patterns of developing countries. It has been postulated that production factors, labor and capital have the greatest effects on economic and development patterns. However, technical change emerges...

In very different fields of economics, economic inference and policy evaluation require economists to parametrize a production function that links measures of input factors to measures of output. While doing so, strong assumptions are implicitly made about microeconomic variables governing the...

Why is it that adopting new technologies takes so long and costs so much? Clearly, firms do not know all the details necessary to implement a complex technology efficiently; learning these details requires extensive search. However, this explanation has a problem: even limited search may be so...