In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by micro and small firms, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. This productivity decline also holds true for professional services in other European countries. Using a German firm-level dataset of 700,000...

Using panel data on European regions and applying Analysis of Covariance, our study provides an empirical assessment of the relative importance of national, regional and spatial factors for explaining variations of productivity. Our analysis shows that initial economic conditions or...

Following a brief review of the theoretical literature on the benefits and shortcomings of fiscal decentralization this paper presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between per capita economic growth and its production function determinants, on the one hand, and constructed...

This study examines the export-led growth hypothesis using annual time series data from Chile in a production function framework. It addresses the problem of specification bias under which previous studies have suffered and focuses on the impact of manufactured and mining exports on productivity...

Inflation differentials in the Euro area are mainly due to a sustained divergence of wage developments across the Euro area, and narrower differences in labour productivity growth (Alvarez et al., 2006). We investigate convergence of inflation using unit labour cost (ULC) growth and applying...

Using unit labor cost (ULC) data from Euro area countries as well as US States and German L¨ander we investigate inflation convergence using different approaches, namely panel unit root tests, cointegration tests and error-correction models. All in all we cannot reject convergence of ULC growth...

In this paper, the process of productivity convergence is investigated for the enlarged European Union using regional (NUTS-2) data. The Solow model extended by human capital is employed as a workhorse. Alternative strategies are proposed to control for spatial effects. All specifications...

This paper studies the productivity impact of heterogeneous capital inputs of selected EU-15 member countries and of the U.S. at the macroeconomic level. The stochastic possibility frontiers approach of Battese and Coelli (1992) applied here is used to identify neutralities or non-neutralities...

In this paper we used the procedures developed in the Kumar and Russell (2002) growth-accounting study to examine cross-country growth during the 1990's. Using a data set comprising developed, newly industrialized, developing and transitional economies, we decomposed the growth of output per...

The neoclassical growth model predicts convergence of productivity or per capita output levels across regions. If participation in the labor force is constant, convergence of per capita income is implied. We investigate this hypothesis for the Iranian economy using data on demand deposits as a...