Australia's Productivity: Some Insights from Productivity Analysis

Revisiting some Productivity Debates

Researchers interested in estimating productivity can choose from an array of methodologies, each with its strengths and weaknesses. I evaluate five widely used techniques; two nonparametric, index numbers and data envelopment analysis, and three parametric methods, instrumental variables estimation, stochastic frontiers, and semi-parametric estimation. Using two samples of manufacturing firms ...

Demographics and recent productivity performance: insights from cross-country comparisons

Over the last few decades, countries have experienced quite different patterns of productivity growth. In this paper, we emphasize the role of country level demographics in explaining these differences. In particular, looking over the period 1960–2002, we show that cross-country data support the notion that, starting in the late 1970s, countries went through a period of technological transition...

Insights into the Tenure-productivity- Employment Relationship

Affix Productivity and Base Productivity

Morphological productivity is generally seen as affix-driven, with a given affix selecting base words satisfying a range of formal and semantic selectional restrictions. Plag (1999), however, has shown that there are base-driven selectional restrictions, and Hay (2000) and Hay & Baayen (2002) have shown that the frequency relation between derived and base word is correlated with affix productiv...

Unions, Productivity, and Productivity Growth

An important recent development has been the emergence o f a body o f literature by Harva rd economists emphasizing a collective voice/insti tutional response (CV/IR) view of unionism, t Possibly the most controversial aspect o f this literature (hereafter, the Harva rd studies) concerns the effects o f unions on labor productivity. Utilizing a product ion function approach, Brown and Medof f (...