When taking into account time, services can experience similar productivity gains as manufacturing. Motion pictures constituted the first technology that industrialized a labour-intensive service. Measuring output in time spent consuming them doubles output growth from 4.2 to as much as 9...

Schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program receive a portion of their federal funding as commodity foods rather than cash payments. This research compared the product costs and estimated total procurement costs of commodity and commercial foods from the school district...

Labor’s share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labor markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network...

The US has experienced a sustained increase in productivity growth since the mid-1990s, particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). This has not occurred in Europe. If the US “productivity miracle” is due to a natural advantage of being located in the US then...

There has been a remarkable increase in wage inequality in the US, UK and many other countries over the past three decades. A significant part of this appears to be within observable groups (such as age-gender-skill cells). A generally untested implication of many theories rationalizing the...

Focusing on homogeneous beliefs, we can distinguish two commonly shared ideas that, i) the competition between informed traders destroys their trading profits, ii) trading with a noisy signal brings about a loss in the expected profits. So far, it has been proved in the latter framework, that...

The fall in output and employment, and the rise in unemployment, during the transition in Bulgaria have been exceptionally severe. This paper examines possible causes, including the role of the financial stabilisation package, collective bargaining and the excess wage tax, the gradual emergence...

In this paper we highlight certain links between unemployment, savings and growth. Using a standard overlapping generations framework modified to incorporate matching frictions in the labour market and a technology capable of yielding unbounded endogenous growth, we show that the cross-country...

This paper surveys the main changes in the level of employment and in the wage structure in OECD countries during the last two decades. Despite a slowdown in the growth rates of output and productivity, employment has continued to grow in the OECD countries. The working age population has also...

Where do the capabilities of new firms in developing countries come from? One answer is from other firms: employees spin off to launch their own businesses. In this project, Marc Muendler and James Rauch of the University of California, San Diego computed, for the first time, the share of...