Total factor productivity—a measure of the efficiency with which labor and capital are used—has fallen during the current recession. But, after adjustment for lower utilization of labor and capital, such productivity has risen strongly over the past two years. These growth-accounting measures suggest that efficiency gains have continued during the recession, boding well for long-term economic g...

An important task in the growth and development literature has been to characterize the nature of cross-country labor efficiency differences. In this paper, I develop a new method to estimate the relative efficiency of skilled and unskilled labor across countries using disaggregated industry and trade data. The method assigns a country a high efficiency of skilled labor if it has low relative u...