In an influential paper Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) argue that the evidence on the international disparity in levels of per capita income and rates of growth is consistent with a standard Solow model, once it has been augmented to include human capital as an accumulable factor. In a study on...

Never in the past 30 years has productivity growth been lower than since the 2008 global financial crisis, and never has income inequality been higher than it is today in Japan, and in the OECD area. The two challenges have some common origins, including a widening productivity and wage gap...

Recent studies warn that the U.S. economy may return to a phase of secular stagnation. In the next 20 to 50 years, U.S. economic growth will be negatively affected by lower contributions of hours worked and education. But some studies also add that productivity could decelerate sharply and that...

In this paper I calibrate unobserved labor-generated knowledge spillovers within and between six large macroeconomic sectors covering the U.S. civilian economy from 1948 to 1991. Using quality-adjusted data I show that manufacturing and trade & transportation are the main source of knowledge...

Aum, Lee, and Shin (2018) quantify the impact of production complementarities and differential productivity growth across occupations and sectors on the slowdown of aggregate productivity growth. This note expands their work to study substitutability between new computer equipment and labor in...

The Irish economy has experienced a decline in productivity growth over the past decade. This has mostly reflected the poor performance of local firms, with the large productivity gap between foreign-owned and local enterprises having widened. Given the mobility of foreign-owned firms, achieving...

Using a worldwide firm-level panel dataset I document a "U-shaped" relationship between productivity growth and baseline levels within each country and industry. That is, fast productivity growth is concentrated at both ends of the productivity distribution. This result serves as a potential...