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...

Experiences during the Great Recession support the view that the UK labor market is relatively flexible. Unemployment rose less and recovered faster than in most other European economies. However, this success has been accompanied by a stagnation of productivity and wages; an open question is...

We show that Autor and Salomons' (2017, 2018) analysis of the impact of technical progress on employment growth is problematic. When they use labor productivity growth as a proxy for technical progress, their regressions are quasi-accounting identities that omit one variable of the identity....

This study examines the causes and consequences of incentive pay adoption among Chinese manufacturing firms. First, we find that a higher degree of labor scarcity encourages firms to adopt more incentive pay. Second, using an instrumental variables approach, we find that a 10 percentage point...

This paper aims to revisit the relationship between intangible capital and labour productivity growth using the largest, up-to-date macro database (2000-2015) available to corroborate the econometric findings of earlier work and to generate novel econometric evidence by accounting for times of...

In this paper, I use Colombian data from 1996-2013 to construct two datasets that are used to assess whether the China Shock has affected the future growth rates of productivity, employment level, workforce composition, wages, export performance, and informal employment levels within Colombias...