Labour productivity growth in the service sector has been low relative to manufacturing. This is explained in part by weak competition in services resulting from strict product market regulation and the low level of import penetration and inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Increasing...

Why do cities differ so much in productivity? We document that most of the measured dispersion in productivity across US cities is spurious and reflects granularity bias: idiosyncratic heterogeneity in plant-level productivity and size, combined with finite plant counts. As a result, economies...

I propose a two-sector endogenous growth model with heterogeneous sectoral productivity and nonlinear hiring costs to analyse the link between sectoral resource allocation, low productivity growth and stagnant real wages. My results suggest that an upward shift in employment, triggered for...

Productivity developments have been rather divergent across EU countries and particularly between Central Eastern Europe (CEE) and elsewhere in the continent (non-CEE). How is such phenomenon related to wage bargaining institutions? Starting from the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) shock, we...

Several studies have highlighted that African manufacturing wages are higher than comparator countries at similar levels of development, which contributes to the continent’s lower levels of manufacturing competitiveness. This paper derives unit labor costs - average wages relative to...

Using the Colombian Annual Manufacturing Survey (AMS) between 2000 and 2014, this paper investigates the effect of labor contract modalities on firm productivity within the industrial sector through a structural model. We find that the elasticity of revenue with respect to temporary workers is...