Climate trends over the past few decades have been fairly rapid in many agricultural regions around the world, and increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and ozone (O3) levels have also been ubiquitous. The virtual certainty that climate and CO2 will continue to trend in the future raises many questions related to food security, one of which is whether the aggregate productivity of globa...

during the last recent decades, restructuring in the electricity industry has been considered as an economical policy. consequently, it was able to increase private investment, competition, efficiency, and productivity. the purpose of restructuring electricity industry is to change electricity industry organization, in order to omit monopoly and increase competition. recognition of restructurin...

U.S. hospitals are under continual pressure both to increase productivity and to improve quality through the use of Health Information Technology. This paper analyzes 3,187 US hospitals, using data reported to the American Hospital Association, to assess changes in productivity over a fiveyear period (2002-2006). The Malmquist Indices derived indicate that Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and Ef...

We decompose labor productivity growth into components attributable to technological change, technological catch-up, foreign capital deepening, domestic capital deepening, and human capital accumulation, thus separating the effects of foreign and domestic capital deepening on productivity growth and convergence. We apply nonparametric production-frontier methods to a worldwide 1980-2005 panel a...

This paper assesses the impact of investmentand education-specific technical change on occupational transition and the skill premium in a model with human capital. In this framework, human capital augments labour productivity and also facilitates the transition to skilled employment. In line with empirical evidence, this setup predicts that an increase in the productivity of physical capital (i...

Sound environmental regulation must achieve environmental objectives while maximizing economic efficiency. This paper evaluates the impact of regulation on efficiency by measuring annual productivity across regulatory regimes in two similar fisheries with differing policy expectations. Anticipation of regulatory change produced strategic behavior in one fishery, leading to depressed productivit...

The key premise of an organization is to allow more efficient production, including production of software. To achieve that, an organization defines roles and reporting relationships. Therefore, changes in organization’s structure are likely to affect organization’s productivity. We investigate several measures of organization and organizational change and relate them to developer productivity....

The sources of aggregate productivity growth are explored using detailed data for four-digit U.S. manufacturing industries during 1958-96 and a decomposition formula which allows to quantify the contribution of structural change. Labor productivity as well as total factor productivity are considered and the aggregation is performed with either value-added or employment shares. It is shown that ...