As online distractions increasingly colonize our time, why has productivity become such a vital demonstration of personal and professional competence? When corporate profits are soaring but worker salaries remain stagnant, how does technology exacerbate the demand for ever greater productivity?...

This paper characterizes the transition dynamics of a continuous-time neoclassical production economy with capital accumulation in which households face idiosyncratic income risk and cannot commit to repay their debt. Therefore, even though a full set of contingent claims that pay out...

Baumol's (1967) model of 'unbalanced growth' yields a supply-side explanation for the 'cost explosion' in health care. Applying a testing strategy suggested by Hartwig (2008), a sprawling literature affirms that the 'Baumol effect' has both a statistically and economically significant impact on...

Over the past decades, models of circular and cumulative causation, based on the endogenous relations between prices, exports, and labour productivity, have lost prominence in explaining economic dynamics. We argue that, in the absence of counterbalancing mechanisms, the combination of...

chapter 1 Introduction -- chapter 2 Growth, employment and the macro-economy -- chapter 3 Unemployment and underemployment -- chapter 4 Real wages and labour productivity -- chapter 5 Poverty, inequality and the labour market -- chapter 6 Labour regulations and business climate -- chapter 7...

Main description: Karl Marx predicted a world in which technical innovation would increasingly devalue and impoverish workers, but other economists thought the opposite, that it would lead to increased wages and living standards--and the economists were right. Yet in the last three decades, the...