This paper measures the productivity impact of shop-floor employee involvement. On the basis of a representative German establishment data set, the study finds that the introduction of team-work and autonomous work groups, and a reduction of hierarchies in 1996/97 significantly increased average establishment productivity in 1997 – 2000. The estimation strategy controls for unobserved invariant...

This paper investigates the relationship between telecommunications infrastructure competition, investment and productivity. Using econometric modelling and input-output economics, the analysis examines and measures the extent to which telecommunications has contributed to national and sectoral productivity performance. The main findings from this paper suggests that most industries have benefi...

Some multi-sector endogenous growth models make strong predictions about productivity differences across sectors in the form of a distribution or density function. In this paper it is demonstrated that this distribution is left-skewed for a wide range of plausible parameter values. This stands in strong contrast to the right-skewed shape of the respective empirical distribution estimated by ker...

We implement an endogeneous switching-regression model for labour productivity and firms’ decision to use business–to–business (B2B) e–commerce. Our approach allows B2B usage to affect any parameter of the labour productivity equation and to properly take account of strategic complementarities between the input factors and B2B usage. Empirical evidence from 1,394 German firms shows that firms u...

Using company account data for the US and four European countries this paper analyses the impact of ICT spillovers on companies’ performance. We use different definitions of spillovers to account for inter and intra-industry spillover effects, as well as assessing the presence of spillovers from the US to Europe. We also look at the possibility that spillovers might take some time to materialis...

This paper explores the issue of efficiency in English higher education using data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis to estimate an output distance function (which incorporates measures of both quantity and quality of teaching and research inputs and outputs) over a thirteen-year period. The study compares the efficiency estimates derived from various estimation methods, and...

The statistical properties of the efficiency estimators based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) are largely unknown. Recent work by Simar et al. and Banker has shown the consistency of the DEA estimators under specific assumptions, and Banker proposes asymptotic tests of whether two subsamples have the same efficiency distribution. There are difficulties arising from bias in small samples and ...

This study explores the reduction potential of greenhouse gases for major pollution emitting countries of the world using nonparametric productivity measurement methods and directional distance functions. In contrast to the existing literature we apply optimization methods to endogenously determine optimal directions for the efficiency analysis. These directions represent the compromise of outp...

This empirical research note documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance with respect to innovative activities (outlays and employment in research and development (R&D)) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany using unique newly available data. We find that fir...

A production technology specification in electricity distribution leads to many product aspects that together with detailed input data gives a high dimensionality. Non-parametric methods may give meaningful results when parametric methods lack degrees of freedom, but have problems with collinear or irrelevant variables. Aggregate efficiency estimates will be little affected, but rates of transf...