Brown Bag Seminar Industrial Economics

This is an online seminar using Cisco Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk.

Abstract:   A fast growing and diverse literature has addressed one of the riddles of economic developments: the declining labor productivity growth in almost all advanced economies. One of the reasons discussed is the shift towards service industries with inherently low productivity growth. We focus on Germany and find that labor productivity in one important services sector – business services – does not grow slowly but actually exhibits negative growth rates.
Following the conventional wisdom, the degree of competitive pressure in a market affects aggregate productivity through various channels. We explore several empirical measures of market competitiveness to find out whether weakened competition can be the explanation for the declining productivity.

Joint work with Alexander Kritikos, DIW Berlin & University of Potsdam, and Alexander Schiersch, DIW Berlin