Peter B. Meyer is a research economist, and Michael J. Harper is the chief of the Division of Productivity Research and Program Development, Office of Productivity and Technology, Bureau of Labor Statistics. E-mail: [email protected] [email protected] Final multifactor productivity measures take more than a year to complete; using a simplified methodology and preliminary data, it is estimat...

Why are taxes higher in Europe than in the US? We propose that it stems from lesser competition across jurisdictions within Europe. We embed self-interested governments and tax competition into a standard neoclassical growth model with public goods. While greater jurisdictional competition reduces taxes it also reduces societal investment in public capital and thus often ends up reducing total ...

Global climate change will increase outdoor and indoor heat loads, and may impair health and productivity for millions of working people. This study applies physiological evidence about effects of heat, climate guidelines for safe work environments, climate modeling, and global distributions of working populations to estimate the impact of 2 climate scenarios on future labor productivity. In mo...

Good morning. When CEDA approached me about speaking today, I was asked to concentrate on longer-term developments that will have a bearing on Australia’s future economic performance. Such an offer seemed hard to refuse, and so I looked around for a topic on which I could hopefully say something of interest. Given the impressive productivity growth that has been experienced over the past decade...

A longstanding puzzle of empirical economics is that average labor productivity declines during recessions and increases during booms. This paper provides a framework to assess the empirical importance of competing hypotheses for explaining the observed procyclicality. For each competing hypothesis we derive the implications for cyclical productivity conditional on expectations of future demand...

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Agricultural laborers frequently work for piece rate wages – where they are paid per unit of output rather than per unit of time – based on the assumption that these wages incentivize productivity. In this paper, I exploit quasi-experimental variation to estimate the elasticity of labor productivity with respect to piece rate wages by analyzing a high-frequency panel of over 2,000 blueberry pic...

This paper is the first paper to present findings evaluating the consequences for employees of full and partial privatization using difference-in-differences combined with propensity score matching. We find: (1) partial privatization causes job creation in contrast to full privatization, which destroys jobs, (2) full privatization causes higher labor productivity improvement than partial privat...