THIS PAPER EXPLORES the comparative productivity performance in manufacturing of three countries-Germany, Japan, and the United Statessince 1950.1 The productivity level estimates are based on the industryof-origin approach, making use of detailed information from censuses of manufactures for each country. Comparative measures of sectoral productivity levels have a vast array of applications in...

Everywhere in the OECD, there has been a shift in relative labor demand away from low-skill workers towards high-skill workers. In the United States, this has led to a decrease in the relative wage of low-skill workers. In Europe, constraints on the relative wage of low-skill workers have led instead to an increase in their unemployment rate, and thus an overall increase in unemployment. As Kru...

* This paper was prepared for the Moscow seminar on Russian economic reform, organised by the IMF for 5-7 April 2000, and summarises part of the work that the authors have done for Chapter 2 of OECD Economic Survey of Russia: 1999-2000.

We model ‘new ideas’ production in a panel of 17 emerging countries. Our results reveal: (i) ideas production is duplicative, (ii) externality associated with domestic knowledge stocks is of above unit factor proportionality, (iii) OECD countries raise the innovation-bar for emerging countries, (iv) there is no significant knowledge diffusion across emerging countries, and (v) growth in emergin...

Over the last 20 years, acute-care hospitals in most OECD countries have built up costly overcapacities. From the perspective of economic policy, it is desirable to know how hospitals of different ownership forms respond to changes in demand and are probably best suited to deal with existing overcapacities. This article examines ownership-specific differences in the responsiveness to changes in...

It has long been argued that the legalization of same-sex marriage would have a negative impact on marriage. In this article, I examine how different-sex marriage in the Netherlands was affected by the enactment of two laws: a 1998 law that provided all couples with an institution almost identical to marriage (a "registered partnership") and a 2001 law that legalized same-sex marriage for the f...