This paper uses a new industry-level dataset to quantify the roles of structural change and information and communication technology (ICT) in explaining productivity growth in the United Kingdom, 1970-2000. The dataset is for 34 industries covering the whole economy, of which 31 industries are...

Greenwood, Hercowitz and Krusell have claimed that the Jorgenson form of growth accounting is conceptually flawed and severely understates the role of technological progress embodied in new capital goods ('embodiment') in explaining US growth. To the contrary, in this paper it is shown that in...

In recent work, Stacey Tevlin and Karl Whelan argue that aggregate econometric models fail to capture the US investment boom in plant and machinery in the second half of the 1990s, whereas a disaggregated approach does much better. In particular, they show that aggregate models do not capture...

The proportionate growth of a company decreases with increases in its initial size, in accordance with the Galton model of regression towards the mean. Gibrat's Law of proportionate effect does not hold within size classes or within industries. In job generation accounting, actual increases in...

According to Baumol's model of unbalanced growth, if resources are shifting towards industries where productivity is growing relatively slowly, the aggregate productivity growth rate will slow down. This conclusion is often applied to the advanced economies, where resources are indeed shifting...

This paper presents comparisons of labor productivity (value added per hour worked) in market services for the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Germany in 1993. Market services, defined as (1) distribution, hotels and catering; (2) transport and communications; and (3) finance,...

The behaviour of labour productivity in the United Kingdom since the onset of the recession in early 2008 constitutes a puzzle. Over four years after the recession began labour productivity is still below its previous peak level. This paper considers the hypothesis that economic capacity can be...

The authors use a data set of 87,000 independent U.K. companies to investigate the relationship between firm size and growth. For the sample as a whole, a Galton-Markov model of regression towards the mean shows that growth is negatively related to initial size. However, when the sample is...