This paper analyses the implications of bargaining between buyers and sellers on the competitive outcome in a homogeneous good industry. Bargaining creates a competitive equilibrium in which some inefficient sellers coexist with efficient leading to productivity dispersion...

List prices are not completely credible as take it or leave it prices: buyers are able to seek reductions by bargaining with firms. We show that this realisation leads to the existence of a critical threshold number of competitors in an industry which depends on fundamentals. In industries with...

This paper develops a sequential learning estimator of production functions and productivitydynamics for unbalanced establishment panels. Extending an idea from the literatureon dynamic industry models, establishments are uncertain about their own idiosyncraticproductivities and update...

The UK’s business R&D (BERD) to GDP ratio is low compared to other leading economies,and the ratio has slowly declined over the 1990s. This paper uses data on large UK firms toanalyse the link between R&D and productivity over the 1989-2000 period. Using aproduction function approach, and a...

Productivity, or the amount of output produced by a given number of inputs,can be measured in a number of ways;1 the focus of Governmentpolicy, and much of the theoretical and empirical literature, is on labourproductivity, which provides the theme of the discussion in this review.A central...

In 2000, the Lisbon Agenda set out an ambitious plan to make the EuropeanUnion “the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy inthe world”. The Agenda suggested a need for action on three broad fronts:the first explicitly macroeconomic; the second explicitly microeconomic;the third...

Renewed interest in economic growth has encouraged studies of how different sectors have contributed to convergence trends. Comparing productivity levels across countries is notoriously tricky, but one attractive approach has been to deflate sector value added by the PPP exchange rate for GDP....

Probably the most enduring result in the theory of optimum income taxation is that,for a sufficiently thin upper tail to the skill distribution, the marginal tax rate shouldfall rather than rise with income. This paper shows that this result is highly sensitiveto a very strong informational...

The growth process for a technological leader is different from that of a follower.While followers can grow through imitation and capital deepening, a leader must undertakeoriginal research. This suggests that as the gap between the leader and the follower narrows, thefollower must undertake...