Agriculture is the focus of much contention in free trade negotiations. The Japanese government is against liberalizing the rice trade on the grounds that it would threaten “national food security” in the events of such shocks as crop failure, war, and embargo. Trade liberalization is expected to make Japan more dependent upon food imports and to make the Japanese economy more susceptible to th...

American industries have grown more concentrated over the last 40 years. In absence of productivity innovation, this should lead to price hikes and output reductions, decreasing consumer welfare. With US census data from 1972 2012, I use disentangle revenue output. Industry-level estimates show that concentration increases are positively correlated real growth, uncorrelated with changes overall...

Using detailed household-level data from Malawi on physical quantities of agricultural outputs and inputs, we measure farm total factor productivity (TFP), controlling for land quality, rain, transitory shocks. We find that operated size capital are essentially unrelated to TFP, implying substantial misallocation. The output gain a reallocation factors their efficient use among existing farmers...

Using historical, ®rm-level data, this study compares the productivity of Japanese and U.S. integrated steel producers. In recent decades Japanese producers have demonstrated higher labor productivity than their U.S. counterparts, due largely to higher investment. Calculations of multifactor productivity suggest that the American ®rms, nevertheless, maintain a small advantage in overall ef®cien...

Underground coal mining is a dangerous industry where the regulatory state may impose tradeoffs between productivity and safety. We recover the marginal tradeoffs using disasters near a mine as shocks that increase future accident costs. We find that in the second year after a disaster, productivity decreases 11% and accident rates decrease 18-80% for mines in the same state, with some evidence...

We develop a multi-sector general equilibrium model in which productivity growth is driven by the production of sector-specific knowledge. In the model, we find that long run differences in total factor productivity growth across sectors are independent of the parameters of the knowledge production function except for one, which we term the fertility of knowledge. Differences in R&D intensity a...

We implement an endogeneous switching-regression model for labour productivity and firms’ decision to use business–to–business (B2B) e–commerce. Our approach allows B2B usage to affect any parameter of the labour productivity equation and to properly take account of strategic complementarities between the input factors and B2B usage. Empirical evidence from 1,394 German firms shows that firms u...

Using micro evidence from manufacturing and services firms located in 55 African countries, this paper shows that better management practice, reflected by international management certification, helps firms to raise productivity. Larger and older firms and firms operating closer to the technological frontier are more likely to possess international management standards certification, as do firm...

Using company account data for the US and four European countries this paper analyses the impact of ICT spillovers on companies’ performance. We use different definitions of spillovers to account for inter and intra-industry spillover effects, as well as assessing the presence of spillovers from the US to Europe. We also look at the possibility that spillovers might take some time to materialis...

This paper examines the costs and bene ̄ts of government control of enterprises in transition, using a large survey of Chinese state enterprises. We ̄nd that tighter government control causes more unpro ̄table production and more surplus employment and thus tends to distort more severely enterprises' economic decisions. However, tighter government control also tends to reduce agency costs by forc...