A framework for applied production theory should focus on the crucial features of the industry to be studied. First of all, to be useful for a dynamic study, a distinction has to be made between the theoretical production possibilities before investment takes place and the actual empirical...

We investigate the impact of sickness absenteeism on productivity by using rich longitudinal matched employer-employee data on Belgian private firms. We deal with endogeneity, which arises from unobserved firm heterogeneity and reverse causality, by applying a modified version of the Ackerberg...

Combining micro and macro data, we construct demand-side shocks, which we take to be exogenous for individual firms. We estimate a reduced-form model to describe how firms adjust their production, employment, capital stock, and inventories in response to such shocks. Then, we chose the...

This paper investigates the impact of labour force composition on productivity in EU arable farming. We test for heterogeneous effects of family and hired labour for a set of five EU member states. To this end, we estimate augmented production functions using FADN data for the years 2001-2008....

We study the nonparametric identification of gross output production functions under the environment of the commonly employed proxy variable methods. We show that applying these methods to gross output requires additional sources of variation in the demand for flexible inputs (e.g., prices)....

The aim of this paper is to examine the goodness-of-fit of several aggregated production functions including the Cobb-Douglas function, the Mankiw, Romer and Weil model, or Mincer's specification for a set of 30 European countries during the period 2006-2015. The dependent variable was economic...

We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline. We estimate the determinants of parents' material and time...