We describe the evolution of productivity growth in a competitive industry with free entry and exit. The exogenous wage rate determines the firms’ engagement in labor productivity enhancing process innovation. There is a unique steady state of the industry dynamics, which is globally asymptotically stable. In the steady state, the number of active firms, their unit labor cost and supply depend ...

Three dimensions of the performance of firms in Ghana’s manufacturing sector are investigated in this paper: their technology and the importance of technical and allocative efficiency. We show that the diversity of factor choices is not due to a non-homothetic technology. Observable skills are not quantitatively important as determinants of productivity. Technical inefficiency is not lower in f...

This study presents the results of an extensive Monte Carlo experiment to compare di erent methods of e ciency analysis. In addition to traditional parametric-stochastic and nonparametric-deterministic methods recently developed robust nonparametric-stochastic methods are considered. The experimental design comprises a wide variety of situations with di erent returns-to-scale regimes, substitut...

This paper applies the concept of damage coefficients introduced in Houba and Kremers (2008) to provide an estimate of the cost of climate change in particular the cost of changes in mean regional temperature and precipitation to the fruit vegetation sector. We concentrate on the production of apples in the German ‘Alte Land’ region. The estimated cost of climate change on apple-growing in the ...

In this paper, “innovative intelligence–biased technological change” (IIBTC) is examined as an alternative to the traditional concept of skill-biased technological change (SBTC) as a source of increases in wage inequality. The innovative intelligence of ordinary or average workers is an important element in productivity and can be heterogeneous across workers. Because technologies are heterogen...

We develop a methodology to analyze capital misallocation (dispersion in static marginal products) measure the contributions of technological/informational frictions and a rich class of firm-specific factors. An application to Chinese manufacturing firms reveals that adjustment costs and uncertainty, while significant, generate only a modest amount of MPK dispersion, which stems largely from ot...

This article examines learning-by-doing that is specific not just to individual firms but to pairs of firms working together in a contracting relationship. Using data from the oil and gas industry, I find that the productivity of an oil production company and its drilling contractor increases with their joint experience. This learning is relationship-specific: drilling rigs cannot fully appropr...

We review the econometric literature on measuring the returns to R&D. The theoretical frameworks that have been used are outlined, followed by an extensive discussion of measurement and econometric issues that arise when estimating the models. We then provide a series of tables summarizing the major results that have been obtained and conclude with a presentation of R&D spillover returns measur...

We propose a Laplace stochastic frontier model as an alternative to the traditional model with normal errors. An interesting feature of the Laplace model is that the distribution of inefficiency conditional on the composed error is constant for positive values of the composed error, but varies for negative values. Therefore, it may be ideally suited for analyzing industries with many forms on o...