Against what theory predicts, large productivity gaps across sectors persist and the process of structural transformation is stagnant in many developing economies. This wedge between observed and optimal labor allocations suggests the presence of institutional and market frictions, which impose costs on the reallocation of labor from low to high productivity sectors, thus leading to sub-optimal allocations ...
Research on the consequences of starting in overeducation often focuses on either secondary or tertiary graduates. We focus on both within one country, Germany. While matching and search models imply the improvement of initial overeducation, human capital theory and stigma associated with overeducation predict entrapment. The strongly skill- and occupation-based labour market for the vocationally trained ...
In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by micro and small firms, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. This productivity decline also holds true for professional services in other European countries. Using a German firm-level dataset of 700,000 observations between 2003 and 2017, we analyze this largely uncovered phenomenon among professional services, the ...
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...
Understanding the causes of the slowdown in aggregate productivity growth is key to maintaining the competitiveness of advanced economies and ensuring long-term economic prosperity. This paper is the first to provide evidence that investment in Knowledge-Based Capital (KBC), despite having a positive effect on productivity at the micro level, is a driver of the weak productivity performance at the ...
In diesem Artikel diskutieren wir die Notwendigkeit von Industriepolitik und die Rolle der Entwicklungsbanken für wirtschaftliche Entwicklung. Der Aufholprozess der Länder des globalen Südens auf das Produktivitätsniveau und den Lebensstandard des globalen Nordens ist die Ausnahme. Dafür gibt es im Wesentlichen zwei ökonomische Erklärungen. Erstens werden die Entwicklungsländer zu Low-Tech- und arbeitsintensiven ...