The extent of band s-convergence of average labor productivity across manufacturing industries in 18 OECD countries over the period 1972–1992 shows large inter-industry differences. One reason for these differences is knowledge and capital barriers preventing the occurrence of catch-up. We find the level of average labor productivity, as a proxy for these barriers, is correlated with the extent...

Caporalato is a widespread system of illegal recruitment and exploitation of underpaid farm labor run by Italian agrimafias. Most of this labor consists of irregular migrants vulnerable to exploitation due to their illegal status and the need of documents. In the 2011 migration wave over 64,000 migrants illegally landed on southern Italian coasts, and many of them may have supplied illegal work...

Ten years have passed since Wal-Mart’s public announcement about its RFID technology adoption plan in 2003. There has been a slowdown of RFID technology adoption since 2008. Many U.S. retailers do not consider adopting the RFID technology because of the uncertainty of return on investment and the lack of business cases. This paper evaluates labor productivity of RFID adopted retailers. This pap...

This paper provides standardized estimates of labor productivity in arable farming in selected regions of the early Ottoman Empire, including Jerusalem and neighboring districts in eastern Mediterranean; Bursa and Malatya in Anatolia; and Thessaly, Herzegovina, and Budapest in eastern Europe. I use data from the tax registers of the Ottoman Empire to estimate grain output per worker, standardiz...

We use nonparametric production function methods to decompose farm-level labor productivity growth into components attributable to efficiency change, technical change, and factor intensity. The estimation is accomplished using balanced panel data drawn from the Kansas Farm Management Association for the period 1993 to 2007. We find that labor productivity growth is primarily driven by factor in...

Productivity growth has been quite strong over the past 21⁄2 years, despite a drop in the second quarter of 2010. Many analysts believe that productivity growth must slow sharply in order for the labor market to recover robustly. However, looking at the observable factors underlying recent productivity growth and the patterns of productivity over past recessions and recoveries, a sharp slowdown...

The study here analyzes the association between R&D expenditure (as % of GDP) and labor productivity across leading geo-economic players. Empirical evidence seems to show, during the period of analysis, a strong positive association between public and private R&D expenditure. In addition, when R&D spending of business enterprise sector exceeds R&D spending of government sector, the labor produc...

This paper uses a novel source of fine-grained data on IT labor mobility to test the hypothesis that patterns of productivity growth observed after the dot-com bust can be partially explained by spillovers of e-commerce know-how from IT industries to other industries. The analysis treats the timing and geographic concentration of dot-com layoffs as a source of exogenous variation in the effects...

This paper empirically studies the impact of the adoption of open source software (OSS) on firms’ labor productivity and innovative behavior. Using a representative sample of German firms, the results show that the adoption of OSS operating systems for servers and general OSS applications has no impact on firm level labor productivity, while the adoption of OSS operating systems for PCs impacts...

Using panel data, this paper tests whether public and private capital have a positive and significant effect on aggregate output and labor productivity for Mexico during the 1960-2001 period. The richer information set made possible by the sectorial data enables this study to utilize the methodologically sound “group-mean” Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) procedure developed by Ped...