Social programs can reduce productivity and growth as they inadvertently generate perverse incentives for workers and firms. The core hypothesis is that these programs segment the labor market, tax formal salaried employment and subsidize informal salaried and non-salaried employment. Larger than optimal self-employment and employment by informal firms lowers aggregate labor productivity. In tu...

Labor productivity in U.S. coal mining increased at an average annual rate of slightly over four percent during the past 45 years. This report examines key factors contributing to that record particularly, technological innovation in both surface and underground mining and concurrent geographic shifts in U.S. coal production. Health, safety, and environmental regulations introduced in the sixti...

it is now evident in the literature that the information and communication technology (ict) has a positive and significant impact on the productivity and economic growth. most studies in this area, however, are limited to the developed countries. given different regulations and economic conditions, and also an increasing trend in allocating resources to ict in developing countries, it is import...

Continuing gains in labor productivity are essential to keep real wages and the U.S. standard of living from stagnating. After a period of strong gains in the 1960s, the average growth rate of productivity slowed substantially in the early 1970s. In the following years, productivity continued to grow slowly despite rapid technological advances in such areas as computers and digital communicatio...

As one of the primary factors of production, labor is an essential element in every nation’s economy. Investing in human capital is widely viewed as a key to sustaining increases in labor productivity and economic growth. While health is increasingly seen as an important part of human capital, environmental protection, which typically promotes health, has not been viewed through this lens. Inde...

Labor law implementation has a basic role in increasing employment stability, decreasing turnover, and managing the employer-employee relation, which increases the productivity levels in any organization. In this paper, the importance of implementing the labor law in the Lebanese pharmaceutical sector, in the two main divisions, sales (medical representative) and community pharmacies is discuss...

1 Abstract This study uses labor productivity in terms of real GDP as a basis for comparing a nation's competitiveness. We evaluate how corporate income tax, dividend tax, and the tax on the highest income bracket affect productivity while controlling for several environmental factors. A set of 24 OECD member nations is observed from 1996-2006. It is found that statutory corporate income tax ra...

Understanding the allocation of skilled labor across industries is necessary to explain inter-industry wage differences and the effect of trade on wages. This paper develops an assignment model with both labor and non-labor inputs in which the assignment of heterogeneous labor across sectors is driven by variation in non-labor input productivity. A scale of operations effect causes high skill a...

The purpose of this study is to provide industry practitioners with a better understanding of the impacts of high-temperature conditions on construction labor productivity. Such information could assist in the establishment of plans to prevent heat-stress injuries and help improve the safety and comfort of construction labor working environments. On-site WBGT (Wet Bulb Globe Temperature) data a...

Drawing on a new set of nationally representative, internationally comparable household surveys, this paper provides an overview of key features of structural transformation - labor allocation and labor productivity - in four African economies. New, micro-based measures of sector labor allocation and cross-sector productivity differentials describe the incentives households face when allocating...