Any serious empirical study of factor substitutability has to allow the data to display complementarity as well as substitutability. The standard approach reflecting this idea is a translog specification – this is also the approach used by numerous studies analyzing the relative capital-skill complementarity hypothesis formulated by GRILICHES (1969). According to this hypothesis, the degree of ...

5 Using novel estimates of sectoral total factor productivities for 72 countries across 5 6 decades we provide evidence of relative productivity convergence: productivity grew 7 systematically faster in initially relatively less productive sectors. These changes have 8 had a significant impact on trade volumes and patterns, and a non-negligible welfare 9 impact. Had productivity in each country...

In this essay I review the main features of neoclassical growth theory, with an eye to seeing what it has to say about the causes of wealth and poverty among nations. I argue that outside the OECD and a comparatively small circle of other countries, neoclassical models contribute little to identifying the deeper sources of cross-national patterns in growth and productivity. I then discuss recen...

This paper explores the development of Cote d’Ivoire’s formal private sector in the years preceding and immediately following the political crises in 1999-2000 and the Civil War that began in 2002. Notably, during the conflict politicians exploited and ex­ acerbated anti-foreigner sentiments, tolerating increasing number of attacks targeting foreigners. We use a unique database from the Registr...

This note shows that differences (across sectors or regions) in the effective price of inputs results in low measured total factor productivity (TFP).

This work examines the presence of unobserved components in the time series of Total Factor Productivity, which is an idea central to modern Macroeconomics. The main approaches in both the study of economic growth and the study of business cycles rely on certain properties of the different components of the time series of Total Factor Productivity. In the study of economic growth, the Neoclassi...

This article identifies environmental pollution as a result of unnecessary use of scarce resources or a substance released to the air, water, or land that could harm human health or the environment. It is proposed that instead of incurring cost to remedy an environmental disaster or to prevent pollution through investment in carbon intensive energy infrastructure, a more practical and cost effe...

This paper uses a structural, large dimensional factor model to evaluate the role of ‘news’ shocks (shocks with a delayed effect on productivity) in generating the business cycle. We find that (i) existing small-scale VECM models are affected by ‘non-fundamentalness’ and therefore fail to recover the correct shock and impulse response functions; (ii) news shocks have a limited role in explainin...

abstract the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between capital stock and increasing the productivity of labor and total factor productivity (tfp) in industrial groups of khorasan razavi province from 2003 to 2007. in order to this first, the available literature in this area and the importance of productivity was reviewed, also the history of productivity in asia and the ...