Rainmakers: why bad weather means good productivity.

Journal of Applied Psychology Rainmakers: Why Bad Weather Means Good Productivity

Competition in Healthcare: Good, Bad or Ugly?

The role of competition in healthcare is much debated. Despite a wealth of international experience in relation to competition, evidence is mixed and contested and the debate about the potential role for competition is often polarised. This paper considers briefly some of the reasons for this, focusing on what is meant by “competition in healthcare” and why it is more valuable to think about th...

PRODUCTIVITY AND UNDESIRABLE OUTPUTS: A DIRECTIONAL DISTANCE FUNCTION APPROACH by

Undesirable outputs are often produced together with desirable. This joint production of good and bad outputs bring about a difficulty for productivity measurement. Here we introduce a directional distance function and use it as a component in a new productivity index. This index, as an empirical example shows, seems to solve the problem caused by the joint production of good and bad outputs. P...

Severe Weather and Automobile Assembly Productivity∗

It is apparent that severe weather should hamper the productivity of work that occurs outside. But what is the effect of extreme rain, snow, heat and wind on work that occurs indoors, such as the production of automobiles? Using weekly production data from 64 automobile plants in the United States over a ten-year period, we find that adverse weather conditions lead to a significant reduction in...

Information Asymmetries and an Endogenous Productivity Reversion Mechanism

Several studies among recent empirical work have suggested that the systematic behavior of lending standards over the business cycles, with laxer standards applied during expansions and tighter standards applied during recessions, may be responsible for driving economic fluctuations. We build a dynamic screening model with informational asymmetry in credit markets that rationalizes these findin...