The slower productivity growth in Canada relative to that experienced in the United States in the second half of the 1990s has been a matter of great concern to Canadians, with a wide variety of explanations put forward to account for this development. A key issue is whether this slower...

Has the economy fundamentally changed in the 1990s because of the introduction of information technology or is the impact of IT not so much "new" as larger than before? In this article, Barry Bosworth and Jack Triplett of the Brooking Institution examine this issue with a detailed analysis of...

The fourth issue of the International Productivity Monitor produced by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains five articles. Topics covered are: recent productivity developments in the United States and Canada and implications for the Canada-U.S. productivity and income gaps; the...

We extend the agglomeration economies literature (1) by comparing the effects on productivity of geographic concentrations in IT activity and all other activity and (2) by distinguishing between the effects of IT-producing and IT-using sectors on productivity. Four measures of agglomeration for...

In many industries, competition is far from perfect and managerial efficiency (or a fixed cost) varies among firms. However, traditional measurement of technological progress assumes perfect competition and no fixed cost. This paper incorporates these two factors in the technological-progress...

Canada-USA comparisons are used to examine whether recent wage polarization is a general phenomenon, or more of a U.S. experience (it is the latter). The role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in "polarization" is examined and the Canadian productivity and ICT lags relative to...

We study the adoption of remote work within cities and its effect on city structure and welfare. We develop a dynamic model of a city in which workers can decide to work in the central business district (CBD) or partly at home. Working in the CBD allows them to interact with other commuters,...

We examine the relationship between lax monetary policy, access to high-yield bond markets and productivity in the US between 2008 and 2016. Using monetary policy surprises, obtained from changes in interest rates futures in narrow windows around FOMC announcements, we isolate the increased...

This paper shows that, counter-intuitively, a higher elasticity of substitution in model production function can lead to reduced economic resilience and larger vulnerability to shocks in production factor prices. This result is due to the fact that assuming a higher elasticity of substitution...

Capital-labor substitution and total factor productivity (TFP) estimates are essential features of growth and income distribution models. In the context of a Monte Carlo exercise embodying balanced and near balanced growth, we demonstrate that the estimation of the substitution elasticity can be...