This paper makes four points about the recent dynamics of productivity and potential output. First, after accelerating in the mid-1990s, labor and total-factor productivity growth slowed after the early to mid 2000s. This slowdown preceded the Great Recession. Second, in contrast to some informal commentary, productivity performance during the Great Recession and early in the subsequent recover...

The main goal of this paper is to test whether macroeconomic conditions affect alcohol consumption using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System for the period 1987–2008. While previous evidence have used pooled cross-section data and rich specifications controlling observed heterogeneity, we feel that both state dependence and unobserved heterogeneity can help in explaining in...

Most working-age Americans obtain health insurance coverage through the workplace. U.S. law requires employers that offer health plans to use a price common to all in the group, but the value of insurance to each risk-averse individual varies with their idiosyncratic health risk. Hence, linking employment and health insurance creates a wedge between the marginal cost and benefit of insurance. S...

Labour and the Market Value of the Firm What role does labour play in firms’ market value? We explore this question using a production-based asset-pricing model with frictions in the adjustment of both capital and labor. We posit that hiring of labour is akin to investment in capital and that the two interact, with the interaction being a crucial determinant of market value behaviour. We use ag...

The Cobb–Douglas function is today one of the most widely adopted assumptions in economic modeling, yet both its theoretical and empirical bases have long been under question. This paper builds an alternative function on very different (albeit also neoclassical) microfoundations aimed at both addressing those theoretical drawbacks and providing a better empirical fit than the Cobb–Douglas formu...

In repeated games with di®erential information on one side, the labelling \general case" refers to games in which the action of the informed player is not known to the uninformed, who can only observe a signal which is the random outcome of his and his opponent's action. Here we consider the problem of minimizing regret (in the sense ̄rst formulated by Hannan [8]) when the information available...

Social capital is a relatively new concept in the social sciences and is one of the most important challenges of new era in a way that based on experts’ comments, the solution for all the problems of today’s modern world is social capital. To this end, one of the problems that managers of organizations particularly; service and manufacturing organizations have faced with today is lack of trust ...