The debate about the long-term economic development of China compared with Europe has taken a new turn with the publication of Kenneth Pomeranz’ book on ‘The Great Divergence’, in which he maintains that before the Industrial Revolution the most advanced parts of China (in particular the...

This paper provides three perspectives on long-run growth rates of labor productivity (LP) and of multi-factor productivity (MFP) for the U. S. economy. It extracts statistical growth trends for labor productivity from quarterly data for the total economy going back to 1952, provides new...

Although Japanese economic growth after the Meiji Restoration is often characterised as a gradual process of trend acceleration, comparison with the United States suggests that catching-up only really started after 1950, due to the unusually dynamic performance of the US economy before 1950. A...

The commonly accepted chronology for comparative productivity levels based on GDP data does not apply to the manufacturing sector, where there is evidence of a much greater degree of stationarity of comparative labour productivity performance among the major industrialized countries of Germany,...

This paper studies the dynamic behaviour of changes in productivity, wages, and prices. Results are based on a new data set that allows a consistent analysis of the aggregate economy, the manufacturing sector, and the non-manufacturing sector. Results are presented for the United States, Japan,...

This paper attempts to assess the relative importance of firm-specific factors (i.e., insider forces) in wage determination. Using firm-level data on 219 UK companies over the period 1974-82, it finds that a 1% rise in a firm's prices or productivity relative to the aggregate economy leads to a...

This paper uses information from a panel of Dutch firms to investigate the labour productivity effects of performance related pay (PRP). We find that PRP increases labour productivity at the firm level with about 9%.

We provide comparisons between East and West Germany before reunification of relative levels of output per hour in manufacturing industries. The comparisons are based on the industry of origin approach which makes use of information on value added and employment derived from production...

Recent work on the effects of permanent technology shocks argue that the basic RBC model cannot account for a negative correlation between hours worked and labour productivity. In this Paper, I show that this conjecture is not necessarily correct. In the basic RBC model, I find that hours worked...

This paper explores the role of replacement and innovation in shaping investment and productivity during episodes of lumpy adjustment in capital. To this purpose we use a rich firm-level panel of Spanish manufacturing data that combines information on equipment investment and firm's strategies....