This paper attempts to reconcile the controversy regarding Japan’s total factor productivity during its slump in the 1990s by clarifying the role of capital utilization. Hayashi and Prescott (2002) emphasized that the decline in the exogenous total factor productivity growth rate was the main cause. However, some empirical studies have also pointed out that the fall in capital utilization rates...

The share market boom in the 1990s is often linked to the acceleration in labour productivity over the same period. This paper explores the suggestions that labour productivity may be an inaccurate measure of firm’s cash flow which underlies equity valuations, and that innovations in productivity in the 1990s may have had only have temporary effects on capital productivity, the key element of t...

In modern businesses, firms face new challenges of managerial retention in capital budgeting process. We consider a model in which a manager privately observes the capital productivity of a project and has access to multiple outside financing options. We show that if the manager can obtain funding from either internal or external capital (but not both), the firm may exclude highly profitable in...

This paper assesses the impact of investmentand education-specific technical change on occupational transition and the skill premium in a model with human capital. In this framework, human capital augments labour productivity and also facilitates the transition to skilled employment. In line with empirical evidence, this setup predicts that an increase in the productivity of physical capital (i...

The sharp increase in equity prices over the 1990s was widely attributed to permanently higher productivity growth derived from the New Economy. This paper establishes a rational expectations model of technology innovations and equity prices, which shows that under plausible assumptions, productivity advances can only have temporary effects on the fundamentals of equity prices. Using historical...

Human capital is considered as a strategic resource among the main resources of any organization and an important factor in producing and presenting services to the society. Improving the productivity of human capital is the main cause of the improvement of productivity in organizations. Management of human capital development, focuses on the quantitative models and technics to test the product...

Because firms invest heavily in R&D, software, brands, and other intangible assets—at a rate close to that of tangible assets—changes in measured GDP, which does not include all intangible investments, understate the actual changes in total output. If changes in the labor input are more precisely measured, then it is possible to observe little change in measured total factor productivity (TFP) ...

We study the optimal combination of corporate tax rate and tax base in a model of a small open economy with heterogeneous firms. We show that it is optimal for the small country’s government to effectively subsidize capital inputs by granting a tax allowance in excess of the true costs of capital. Economic integration reduces the optimal capital subsidy and drives low-productivity firms from th...

We study the optimal combination of corporate tax rate and tax base in a model of a small open economy with heterogeneous firms. We show that it is optimal for the small country’s government to effectively subsidize capital inputs by granting a tax allowance in excess of the true costs of capital. Economic integration reduces the optimal capital subsidy and drives low-productivity firms from th...

We develop a model where competing employers gradually learn about a worker’s productivity, like in the standard Jovanovic (1979) learning model. Rather than assuming that productivity is match-specific, we allow for general human capital productivity. We consider competitive wage determination through matching wage offers and counter-offers. We can also characterize the wage dynamics. Some of ...