Despite a continuing interest in the compared efficiency of labor-managed and conventional firms, only a handful of comparative empirical studies exist. These studies suggest that labor-managed firms have the same productivity levels as conventional ones, but organize production differently. However, the data used in these studies cover a single industry, or firms matched by industry and size i...

This paper shows, in a two-sector Malthusian model of endogenous population growth, that output per capita, population density, and industrialization depend upon the labor intensity of agricultural production. Because the diminishing returns to labor are less pronounced, high labor intensity (as in rice production) leads not only to a larger population density but also to lower output per capit...

Is productivity growth inimical to employment? Canonical economic theory says no, but much recent economic theory says ‘maybe’ — that is, rapid advances in machine capabilities may curtail aggregate labor demand as technology increasingly encroaches on human job tasks. We explore the relationship between productivity growth and employment using countryand industry-level data for 19 countries ov...

This study aims to understand how characteristics of a labor flow network affect firm productivity using an inter-firm hiring network constructed from individual job histories. We separate IT-labor from non-IT labor and use the network measures constructed from the two types of labor flow to evaluate how they affect firm performance. We find that hiring IT workers from a diverse set of firms ca...

Among the variables most often tracked by economic analysts and policymakers, the rate of growth of labor productivity is one of the most volatile and hardest to interpret, at least in the short run. Yet, it is often used to explain movements in inflation and output under the assumption that there are stable relationships between productivity growth and those variables. This paper uses frequenc...

This paper presents a real business cycle model with search frictions in the asset market, where equity liquidity is endogenously determined. I use the model to study how labor input, asset liquidity and asset prices fluctuate in response to productivity and liquidity shocks, and how, in turn, these fluctuations magnify the impact of productivity shocks on economic activity. A household’s inves...

The factors that account for the differences in the economic productivity of urban areas have remained difficult to measure and identify unambiguously. Here we show that a microscopic derivation of urban scaling relations for economic quantities vs. population, obtained from the consideration of social and infrastructural properties common to all cities, implies an effective model of economic o...

a r t i c l e i n f o For a set of 14 developing countries I evaluate whether differences in wage gaps between sectors – estimated from individual-level wage data – have meaningful effects on aggregate productivity. Under the most generous assumptions regarding the homogeneity of human capital, my analysis shows that eliminating wedges between wages in different sectors leads to gains in output...

U.S. productivity growth has slowed significantly since 1973; moreover, U.S. productivity continues to grow at a slower rate than that of our major trading partners. What caused these things to happen? The answer to this question is still unsettled, although a number of potential explanations are being debated in the economics literature. These include energy prices, labor quality, measurement ...