This paper introduces two complementary models of firm-specific training: an informational model and a productivity-enhancement model. In both models, market provision of firm-specific training is inefficient. However, the nature of the inefficiency depends on the balance between the two key components of training, namely productivity enhancement and employee evaluation. In the informational mo...

This article reviews the history of the productivity adjustment in the fee schedule and the literature on measuring productivity in health care. Measuring physician-specific productivity is challenging, a principal reason why the actual update formula uses an economywide measure of productivity change. A number of the challenges, including adjusting for quality, the use of administered prices, ...

We examine the effects of technology on productivity growth by disaggregating total output into sectoral components, exploring the roles of investment and technology on productivity growth for countries in different income groups. We find that for low-income countries, investment is the most important determinant of productivity growth. While investment plays an important role in determining pr...

Under the assumption that knowledge is endogenously produced through a learning-by-doing process, we show that a standard one-sector real business cycle model augmented with only a learning-by-doing technology can exhibit an expectations-driven business cycle in response to news about a future temporary change in total factor productivity. News about future productivity immediately increases th...

The study is devoted to the measurement of productivity and efficiency change in Chinese farming sector over the reform process in the 1980s and 1990s. Within an output distance function framework, an index of total factor productivity is decomposed into technical and allocative efficiency, technical change, and scale effects. We estimate a parametric output distance function using individual f...

Researchers of regional and international productivity comparisons are increasingly adopting various frontier approaches to examine convergence and the possible causes of productivity differences. We argue that economy-wide technology frontiers estimated with aggregate measures of output are downward biased. This bias extends not only to estimates of the technology frontier, but also produces i...

The standard measure of productivity growth is the Solow residual. Its evaluation requires data on factor input shares or prices. Since these prices are presumed to match factor productivities, the standard procedure amounts to accepting at face value what is supposed to be measured. In this paper we determine total factor productivity growth without recourse to data on factor input prices. Fac...