Two issues related to mapping a multi-sector model into a reduced-form value-added model are often neglected: the composition of intermediate goods, and the distinction between value added productivity and gross output productivity. We demonstrate their quantitative significance for the case of the well known model of Greenwood, Hercowitz and Krusell (1997), who find that about 60% of economic ...

This paper explores the relevance of unknown nonlinearities for growth empirics. Recent theoretical contributions and case-study evidence suggest that nonlinearities are pervasive in the growth process. I show that the postwar data provide strong evidence in favor of generalized non-linearities. I provide two alternative mechanisms for making inference about the effects of production-function s...

Legal simplification may improve the quality of institutions in industrialised countries that developed over-complex legal systems. In theory, this type of regulatory reform promotes economic efficiency, leading to higher levels of productivity and output. In this paper we use a Panel Factor-Augmented VAR approach to measure the long-run impact of legal-simplification programmes in total factor...

We exploit historical data on planned highways, railroads, and exploration routes as sources of exogenous variation, in order to estimate the effect of interstate highways on regional innovation: a 10% increase in a region?s stock of highways causes a 1.7% increase in regional patenting over a five-year period. In terms of the mechanism, we report evidence that roads facilitate local knowledge ...

Environmental pollution and human health problems are becoming serious issues in China. This research focuses on regional differences in productive inefficiencies and attempts to clarify the determinants of inefficiency, accounting economic, environmental and health-related factors. Our dataset includes information of 29 areas in China from 2003 to 2009. We find that after accounting for enviro...

In this paper the time series properties of the outcomes of two different specifications of a nonparametric productivity analysis are compared using data for threeand four-digit U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 1958-96. The first model is standard and does not account for variations of capacity utilization of the production factors whereas the second model does. Correcting for util...

The paper explores the effect of technological specialisation on economic growth within a balance-of-payments-constrained growth model. We find that countries that are specialised in fast-growing technologies experience above average rates of growth due to the positive effects on international competitiveness. Moreover, we find that innovation, imitation and investment affect countries’ perform...

This paper provides a time-series analysis of recent annual estimates of real GDP and industrial output covering 1270 to 1913. We show that growth can be regarded as a segmented trend stationary process. On this basis, we find that trend growth of real GDP per person was zero prior to the 1660s but then experienced two significant accelerations, preand post-industrial revolution. We also find t...

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...

I adopt the distribution dynamics framework to study labor productivity convergence, in the period 1980-1995, among 28 developed and developing countries, in different manufacturing sub-sectors, identified, as according their technological content into Resource Based, Low Technology, Medium Technology and High Technology. I find that, exception made for High Technology and Manufacturing as a wh...