Do openness to trade and higher levels of human capital promote faster productivity growth? That they do is a key implication of several versions of endogenous growth theory. To answer the question we use panel data on 93 countries spanning the 1970-2000 period. Controlling for fixed effects as...

Do openness to trade and higher levels of human capital growth promote faster growth? To answer that question we use a panel of countries to investigate the role of human capital and two measures of openness in determining both the level of income and its growth rate. We argue that focusing on...

The paper measures productivity growth in seventeen countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  GDP per worker and capital per worker in 1985 US dollars were estimated for 1820, 1850, 1880, 1913, 1939 by using historical national accounts to back cast Penn World Table data for 1965...

This paper surveys the most popular parametric and semi-parametric estimators for Cobb-Douglas production functions arising from the econometric literature of the past two decades. We focus on the different approaches dealing with 'transmission bias' in firm-level studies, which arises from...

This paper contributes to the debate on the causes of unemployment in interwar Germany. It applies the Layard-Nickell model of the labour market to interwar Germany, using a new quarterly data set. The basic model is extended to capture the effects of the tariff wage under the Weimar Republic...

The labour productivity differentials between manufacturing firms in Ghana and South Korea exceed those implied by macro analysis.  Median value-added per employee is nearly 40 times higher in South Korea than Ghana.  The most important single factor in explaining this difference is the...

Although it is a common theoretical assumption that the chances to find a job fall with time in unmeployment, this is not systematically confirmed by empirical evidence, and there is no evidence for developing countries.  We develop a farmework that allows us to test the four major explanations...

British regions display persistent differences in both earnings and unemployment rates. A number of studies have found that in general, regions that have high unemployment tend to have low wages. This runs contrary to a compensating differentials argument that high wages should compensate for...

Chinese economic growth has been spectacular in the last 30 years.  We investigate the role of International Joint Ventures with Technology Transfer agreements, an understudied area.  Technology transfer is the traditional mechanism for developing countries to "catch up" and has been a key...

We present an empirical analysis of the determinants of labour cost in OECD countries, with particular reference to the impact of labour market institutions from 1960 to 1994. The main contribution of the paper is to show that labour market regulations can explain a large part of labour cost...