This paper examines patterns of structural change and labour productivity growth in the late nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire. Using shift-share analysis and a set of basic measures to account for the contribution of physical and human capital growth, it seeks to address three questions:...

New data on individual worker’s outputs show that New England ring spinners exhibited substantial on the job learning c. 1905. Despite this, variable capital-labour ratios meant high labour turnover reduced aggregate labour productivity only fractionally. The combination of variable...

Theory predicts that mandated employment protections may reduce productivity by distortingproduction choices. Firms facing (non-Coasean) worker dismissal costs will curtail hiringbelow efficient levels and retain unproductive workers, both of which should affectproductivity. These theoretical...

We revisitWestern Europe’s record with labor-productivity convergence and tentativelyextrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. Thepoorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through bothhigher rates of physical capital accumulation and greater...

This article puts the relationship between wage dispersion and firm productivity to an updatedtest, taking advantage of access to detailed Belgian linked employer-employee panel data.Controlling for simultaneity issues, time-invariant workplace characteristics and dynamics inthe adjustment...

We study how workers’ wages respond to TFP-driven innovations in firms’ labor productivity.Using unique data with highly reliable firm-level output prices and quantities in themanufacturing sector in Sweden, we are able to derive measures of physical (as opposed torevenue) TFP to instrument...

Using a longitudinal matched employer-employee data set for Portugal over the 1986-2005period, this study analyzes the heterogeneity in wages responses to aggregate labor marketconditions for newly hired workers and existing workers. Accounting for both worker and firmheterogeneity, the data...

This paper estimates the impacts of weight, measured by body mass index (BMI), onemployment, wages, and missed work due to illness for Russian adults by gender, in orderto better understand the mechanisms through which obesity affects employment, wages,and sick-leave days using recent panel data...

There are substantial differences in output per worker across states that persist over time. This studydemonstrates that differences in state taxation of capital income, capital ownership, and consumption canexplain why differences in labor productivity can persist. First, state tax policies...

This paper presents a twoequationmodel of joint outcomes on an individual’sdecision to binge drink and on his/her annual labor market earnings. The primary data source isthe 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), 19791994.We showthat binge drinking behavior is quite...