In response to recent discussions regarding the ability of hospitals to achieve gains in productivity, we present two methodologies that attempt to measure multifactor productivity (MFP) in the hospital sector. We analyze each method and conclude that the inconsistencies in their outcomes make it difficult to estimate a precise level of MFP that hospitals have historically achieved. Our goal in...

How Tax Progression Affects Effort and Employment Within an efficiency wage framework, we study the effects of two revenue-neutral tax reforms that change the progressivity of the labour tax system. A revenue-neutral increase in both the wage tax and tax exemption and a revenue-neutral change in the composition of labour taxation towards the tax with the smaller tax base will lead to the same r...

Software measures are of paramount importance to evaluate both processes and products. However, collecting such data requires a large effort and this activity produces benefits only in the long term. For these reasons, companies have to use automated tools able to collect data without affecting both the productivity and the process. This approach is useful to reduce the effort related to the me...

We study how a gift exchange labor market reacts to the occurrence of negative shocks. One-round shocks may hit either workers’ wages or employers’ earnings (via worker productivity). In our model, other-regarding preferences suffice predict and above competitive level. Wage rigidity is predicted if we add wage illusion loss aversion. Using real-effort laboratory experiment, find support for mo...

In social or organizational networks, it is often observed that different individuals put different levels of production effort depending on their position in the network. One possible reason is reward sharing, which incentivizes particular agents to spend effort in sharing information with others and increasing their productivity. We model the effort level in a network as a strategic decision ...

This paper gives a detailed experiment feedback of different approaches to adapt a statistical machine translation system towards a targeted translation project, using only small amounts of parallel in-domain data. The experiments were performed by professional translators under realistic conditions of work using a computer assisted translation tool. We analyze the influence of these adaptation...