A look at productivity at the firm level in eight French service industries

In this paper, we take advantage of information collected by the French annual survey of market services to analyze productivity differences and changes among firms in eight major industries (restaurants, hotels, engineering, computer programming, computer processing, legal services, accounting and building cleaning), over the five-year period 1984–1988. We find a pattern of cross-sectional and time-series type estimates of the Cobb-Douglas production function, which is comparable to that typically found in studies of manufacturing industries, thus raising similar issues of interpretation and modeling. Using a capital stock measure corrected for rented equipment and building and taking into account the number of hours of work of work per employee improve these estimates to some extent. An interesting finding is that the output elasticity seems significantly smaller with respect to hours per employee than with respect to the number of employees.