Analyzing China's productivity growth: Evidence from manufacturing industries

This article examines the growth attributes of manufacturing industries in China for the sample period of 1999–2007. The output growth of manufacturing industries classified under four groups and four regions is decomposed into four components of input growth, scale effect, technical progress, and technical efficiency change. A stochastic frontier model is applied to the translog production function to estimate technical efficiency. Despite the conventional argument that input growth and technical progress are important factors to output growth, the empirical findings show a significant scale effect but a weak technical efficiency change. The contribution to growth from labor has been replaced by human and physical capitals. Structural transformation in the industrial sector is evident, so as regional imbalances.     

Sources of productivity growth: Evidence from the Mexican manufacturing sector

We study labor and total factor productivity in the Mexican manufacturing sector for the 1994 to 2002 period. Labor productivity increased at an annual rate of 3 percent, while total factor productivity has null or negative growth depending on the methodology used. We conduct several robustness checks by providing alternatives measures of productivity growth. Moreover, we investigate the sources of productivity growth by studying the impact of international trade, investment, quality of the labor force and labor market institutions.     

The day-of-the-week effect is weak: Evidence from the European real estate sector

The day-of-the-week effect for the securitized real estate indices is investigated by employing daily data at the global, European and country level for the period 1990 to 2010. We test for daily seasonality in 12 countries using both full sample and rolling-regression techniques. While the evidence for the former is in line with the literature, the results for the latter cast severe doubts concerning the existence of any persistent day-of-the-week effects. Once we allow our sample to vary over time, the average proportion of significant coefficients per day ranges between 15 % and 24 %. We show that higher average Friday returns evident in previous literature, remain significant in 21 % of the rolling samples. We conclude that daily seasonality in the European Real Estate sector is subject to the data mining and sample selection bias criticism.     

Schooling and productivity growth: evidence from a dual growth accounting application to U.S. states

This paper exploits the dual growth accounting framework to determine the effect of schooling on total-factor productivity (TFP) growth for U.S. states over 1980–2010. The paper contributes to the literature by constructing TFP growth measures, in the process, both real wage growth and real user cost growth measures at the state level. The growth accounting exercise reveals that states display considerable heterogeneity in TFP growth with both real wage growth and real user cost growth equally contributing to it. While our econometric estimates reveal significant TFP growth effects associated with college education, they are considerably lower in magnitude when compared to the earlier studies. Productivity growth effects associated with high school education remain insignificant. Our empirical findings are further validated by the use of instrumental variable estimation to address the endogeneity of the schooling variables and are also robust to the inclusion of a rich set of control variables, alternative TFP growth measures as well as to the tests to draw robust inferences in the presence of weak instruments.     

The exchange rate pass-through in the new EU member states

This paper aims to complete our understanding of the relationship between changes in nominal effective exchange rates and prices in the new EU member states. I investigate the exchange rate pass-through to import, producer and consumer prices for ten Central and Eastern European countries with quarterly data from January 1996 to December 2011. In a first step, the pass-through estimates are derived from a dynamic panel data model through the generalized method of moments. A statistically significant exchange rate pass-through to consumer, producer and import prices is found, both in the short and long run. In a second step, I proceed to an individual analysis, country by country, and find support for an increased heterogeneity in the exchange rate pass-through estimates. In a third step, I assess the drivers of the estimated exchange rate pass-through coefficients and find support for a significant impact of exchange rate volatility, inflation volatility, import dependence, and the output gap, as well as the global outlook.     

Directed technological change,skill complementarities and sectoral productivity growth: evidence from industrialized countries during the new economy

Recent growth accounting exercises attribute strong productivity growth to increased investments in information and communication technologies (ICT) over the last decades, but abstain from potential complementarity effects with other inputs. Based on three different sets of industrialized countries, this study shows that sectoral productivity growth originated from ICT-skill complementarities and skill-biased technological change (SBTC) during the New Economy. In particular, Scandinavian goods-producing sectors and Anglo–Saxon market services reveal strong SBTC effects that originated from ICT-skill complementarities, while such effects were totally missing in Continental market services during the same periods. Further drivers of productivity growth were intermediate and non-ICT capital deepening.     

Wages,implicit contracts,and the business cycle: Evidence from a European panel

We study the joint behavior of hours and wages over the business cycle in a unique panel of 13 European countries, and document significant history dependence in wages. Workers who experience favorable market conditions during their tenure on the job have higher wages, and work fewer labor hours. Unobserved differences in productivity, such as varying job quality, or match-specific productivity are not likely to explain this variation. The results instead point to the importance of contractual arrangements in wage determination. In economies with decentralized bargaining practices, such arrangements resemble self-enforcing insurance contracts with one-sided commitment (by the employer). On the other hand, in countries with strong unions and centralized wage bargaining, wage behavior is better approximated by full-commitment insurance contracts. The co-movement of hours and wages further confirms a contractual framework with variable worker hours. Despite the strong prevalence of contracts in Europe, however, the elasticity of labor supply is considerably smaller compared to the U.S. labor market.     

Globalisation,industrial diversification and productivity growth in large European R&D companies

This paper aims to assess the impact of both geographic and industrial diversification of economic activities on the productivity performance of large European R&D Multinational Enterprises (MNEs). Based on the worldwide subsidiaries of these firms, we measure the performance of the firms according to their level of industrial diversification and globalisation that we proxy with the presence and importance of subsidiaries in the EU, North America and Asia–Pacific regions. The sample consists of large R&D firms that represent about 80 % of total European R&D. In general, the results indicate a positive impact from globalisation on firms’ R&D productivity, especially in the US, while a negative impact for industrial diversification is found.     

Structural changes,market growth and productivity gains of the US real estate investment trusts in the 1990s

The 1990s were tumultuous times for the US Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) industry. Significant structural changes occurred during the decade, especially after the 1993 Revenue Reconciliation Act, which tremendously boosted the flow of funds into the system by allowing the participation of institutional investors in REITs. As a result, the industry experienced remarkable asset growth during the decade, with a large number of initial public offerings and substantial increases in market capitalization. Employing the Data Envelopment Analysis-type Malmquist index approach, this paper explores the impact of such environmental changes on productivity growth, efficiency change, and technological progress of REITs. Our results indicate that while efficiency of the REITs significantly increased, their average productivity declined and technology regressed during this decade. It appears that the typical REIT has failed to improve technically, but exerted substantial effort to catch up with the best practice ones relying mainly on aggressive growth strategies. However, our empirical results indicate that they might have overextended themselves as most began to suffer from diseconomies of scale.

Capital-skill complementarity,productivity and wages: Evidence from plant-level data for a developing country

Different types of labor and capital inputs have varying productive contributions that are dependent on plant characteristics. We estimate such contributions and their underlying determinants, recognizing the interactions among labor and capital components that reflect their substitutability or complementarity, for Turkish manufacturing plants. We distinguish technical and non-technical labor, and structures, machinery and computer capital, as well as the shares of female workers and imported capital in our production function specification. We find capital-skill complementary for both machinery and computers; greater productive contributions and thus wages for skilled labor are associated with more machinery intensity and computer use. The reverse is true for unskilled labor, which is complementary only with capital structures. Our results suggest that synergies among skilled (technical) labor, computers, and machinery capital have productivity- and skilled wage-enhancing effects that could contribute to productivity convergence of developing toward developed countries, even with their differing industry and input composition.     

House price convergence: Evidence from US state and metropolitan area panels

We study house price convergence in panels of US states and metropolitan areas. Our analysis is centered on three issues. First, we test whether the US house prices are converging over time using log t convergence test by Phillips and Sul (2007). The test results suggest that there is little evidence of overall convergence. The second issue is to investigate the possibility of a convergence club where the cross-sectional dispersion of house prices of the club members decreases over time. We utilize a clustering algorithm and the results support that there is strong evidence of multiple convergence clubs. Finally, we examine the general characteristics of the various convergence and divergence subgroups as well as some important driving forces of convergence clubs. We find that housing supply regulation together with climate are important determinants of convergence club membership.     

土地使用与交通的整合:新城市主义和理性增长

文章的主要目标是评论美国交通与土地利用整合的实践,同时试图针对中国的城市规划实践提出建议.文章由三个部分组成.第一部分介绍城市理性增长作为区域尝试来促进土地利用与交通的整合;第二部分简要评述用以土地利用和交通整合的定量模型和评价可以用于土地利用与交通整合的指标体系;第三部分介绍新城市主义.     

Monetary policy and stock prices in small open economies: Empirical evidence for the new EU member states

This study presents evidence on the effect of domestic and Euro Area monetary policy on stock prices in four new EU member states of Central Europe and the main determinants of stock price volatility, estimating structural vector autoregressive models identified with short-run restrictions. We find that stock prices in the considered new EU member states are more sensitive to changes in the Euro Area interest rate than to the domestic one. Moreover, the bulk of stock price volatility in these countries is due to shocks related to exchange rate and Euro Area monetary policy. Overall, we find that local stock markets are more sensitive to external shocks than to domestic ones.     

Capital utilization, economic growth and convergence

Optimal decisions by economic agents regarding the utilization of capital lead to empirically plausible speeds of convergence in one-sector models of economic growth. The relationship between depreciation and capital utilization plays a crucial role in slowing down convergence to the steady state. Cross-country differences in the extent to which the capital utilization decision is internalized along the transition path may lead to differences in convergence rates, even for countries with similar initial and terminal conditions. Finally, by assuming a constant depreciation rate and full capital utilization, standard growth models may be overstating the magnitude of the steady-state equilibrium.     

Production functions and productivity of family firms: Evidence from the S&P 500

This paper examines whether the higher profitability and valuation of family firms is related to differences in production technologies and production efficiency. Using data on S&P 500 manufacturing firms, we find that family firms are more productive than comparable non-family firms. Furthermore, our results show that the production technologies of family and non-family firms do not differ per se, thereby suggesting that the differences in the level of production output are caused by higher production efficiency of family firms. These findings indicate that the superior performance of family firms is related to their more efficient use of labor and capital resources.     

The role of banks in the monetary policy transmission in the new EU member states

This paper aims to enrich the knowledge on the monetary policy transmission mechanism in the new European Union member states with empirical evidence on the impact of monetary policy on bank lending. This work is based on individual bank balance sheet data and covers a sample of commercial banks from 10 Central and Eastern European countries over the period 1998–2006. We follow the approach suggested by Kashyap and Stein (1995) and control for cross-section heterogeneities among banks. The results indicate the existence of asymmetric adjustment of loan quantities with respect to specific bank characteristics. Our findings indicate the existence of a functioning bank-lending channel through small banks. This applies in the short-run to several, but not all, of the analysed banks.