This study investigates empirically how managerial practices have affected macroeconomic adjustment during the Great Recession after the 2008 economic crisis. We start by constructing a country*industry balanced panel data over the 2007-2015 period for eighteen industries in ten OECD countries, and complementing it by two indicators: an indicator of management quality at the country level based on the managerial practices categorical scores at firm level from Bloom et al. (2012); and an indicator at the industry level for the shocks stemming from the 2008 economic crisis. We then rely on the local projection method pioneered by Jorda (2005) to estimate the direct impacts of country management quality indicators and industry economic shocks as well as their joint impacts, on five variables of interest: value-added, employment, labor productivity, wage per employee and labor share during the Great Recession. We find that, in countries where management quality is higher, production and employment are more resilient during the Great Recession, with less production losses and employment damages, no effects on productivity, wage moderation and a slight increase in the labor shares. It appears, moreover, that this resilience is increasing with the size of industry shocks.

This article explores how regulations that restrict competition in key Canadian non-manufacturing sectors such as energy, transport, trade, and professional services have contributed to the country's long-standing productivity gap with the United States. Using international data on anticompetitive regulations and productivity from 15 countries and a large number of industries over the 1996-2021 period, the study finds that regulation in these upstream sectors, which supply essential inputs to the rest of the economy, plays a role in shaping overall productivity performance. Taking results causally, a thought experiment suggests that if Canada were to implement an ambitious reform effort aimed at adopting best international practices in regulating these four sectors, GDP per capita could rise in the long term by between 6.5 and 10 percent, depending on the range of reforms implemented. Gains would originate from procompetitive reforms in all sectors, with the largest ones coming from the professional services and retail distribution. Overall, the findings highlight the major economic benefits Canada could reap from implementing a deeper and swifter pro-competitive reform agenda than in the past.

While the employment effects of robots are a matter of vivid debate among economists, only a few empirical studies have looked at their impact on productivity and growth at the country level. This paper provides new estimates of the robots’ contribution to growth in a set of 29 advanced economies countries over the period 1960–2022. Based on a standard growth accounting framework, the user cost of robots is estimated according to two different methodologies. The estimated robots’ contribution to growth largely differs between the two methodologies, suggesting that the value of the stock of robots, the decrease in their quality-adjusted price index or both may be undervalued. These findings call for further research on the robots’ contribution to growth at the country level.

This study investigates empirically how differences in managerial practices shaped the macroeconomic recovery from the 2008 Great Recession. We build a country-industry panel over the 2007-2015 period for eighteen industries in nine OECD countries, using an indicator of management quality at the country level based on the categorical scores of managerial practices collected at the firm level by Bloom et al . (2012) and an indicator measuring the industry level shocks caused by the 2008 economic crisis. We then rely on the local projection method pioneered by Jord & agrave; (2005) to estimate the impact of the shocks on post-2009 macro developments at different levels of managerial quality. We find that both production and employment were more resilient in countries where management quality is higher, resulting in no significant cumulative impact of management quality on productivity over the recovery. The effects of management on production and employment resilience are stronger for industries deeply affected by the 2008 crisis and go along with wage moderation and a slight increase in the labour share.

This paper highlights how technology can contribute to reaching the 2015 Paris Agreement goals of net zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and global warming below 2 & DEG;C in 2100. It uses the Advanced Climate Change Long-term model (ACCL), particularly adapted to quantify the consequences of energy price and technology shocks on CO2 emissions, temperature, climate damage and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The simulations show that without climate policies the warming may be +5 & DEG;C in 2100, with considerable climate damage. An acceleration in 'usual' technical progress not targeted at reducing CO2- even worsens global warming and climate damage. According to our estimates, the world does not achieve climate goals in 2100 without 'green' technologies. Intervening only via energy prices, e.g. a carbon tax, requires challenging hypotheses of international coordination and price increase for polluting energies. We assess a multi-lever climate strategy combining energy efficiency gains, carbon sequestration, and a decrease of 3% per year in the relative price of 'clean' electricity with a 1 to 1.5% annual rise in the relative price of polluting energy sources. None of these components alone is sufficient to reach climate objectives. Our last and most important finding is that our composite scenario achieves the climate goals.

La productividad ha ido desacelerando en las economías avanzadas durante varias décadas, y los incrementos potenciales de productividad actuales se encuentran entre las más bajas observadas en más de un siglo, a excepción de en tiempos de guerra. A esta desaceleración general se añade una caída en Europa en comparación con los Estados Unidos, que se intensificó después de la pandemia. Con los inicios de una masiva propagación de la inteligencia artificial (IA), sus efectos sobre la productividad aumentan las esperanzas de una nueva revolución industrial, a pesar de que las estimaciones macroeconómicas actuales parecen decepcionantes.

Using a unique dataset of approximately 1,400 French manufacturing firms, this study provides insights into their utilization of telework in 2019. Our findings reveal firms that engaged in telework benefit from a Total Factor Productivity substantially higher than those that did not. Additionally, we uncover a non-linear relationship between the extent of telework usage and productivity. These descriptive results align with recent worker surveys and experiments, adding valuable and rich firm-level information to the ongoing conversation on teleworking and its potential impact on productivity.

Business environments dominated by information flows and autonomous tasks, typical of knowledge-intensive industries, are likely to require enough social capital to be viable and productive. In this paper, we use new EUKLEMS-INTANProd industry-level data (Bontadini et al., 2023a) covering a panel of 19 countries and 20 industries over the 1995-2018 period to investigate the influence of a key element of social capital – trust – on labour productivity in intangible-intensive industries, controlling for hiring and firing regulations that can constrain the ability of managers to implement best practices productively. We find that in such industries, productivity gains from high levels of trust are stronger than elsewhere, while too strict hiring and firing regulations are more damaging for productivity. Using a more limited sample for which data on management quality are available, we show that the positive impact of high trust on productivity in intangible-intensive industries is channeled by the ability to benefit from good management, a key element of organizational capital. Productivity gains from relatively high levels of trust in knowledge-rich environments are estimated to be sizeable and our estimates survive a number of robustness checks.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

We propose a theoretical model of the relationship between productivity and working hours, assuming a circular relationship between these two variables. It appears that the direction and magnitude of the impact of productivity on working hours depend on the returns to scale of hours worked and on the elasticity of substitution between leisure and labor income. These findings significantly contribute to our understanding of work and leisure trade-offs and explain the contrasted results in the empirical literature.

Measurements and perceptions of growth are often contrasting and, indeed, GDP growth does not necessarily imply an economic improvement that is felt by the population.In order to quantify this difference, we are developing an indicator of monetary well-being called "Real Feel GDP", which measures, in a money metric, the national average contribution of income to life satisfaction.It offers a retrospective view that is very different from that measured by GDP.For example, in the United States, Real Feel GDP stagnated between 1978 and 2020, while GDP tripled.The gap between Europe and the United States has widened in terms of GDP per capita, but it has narrowed in terms of Real Feel GDP per capita, with countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Finland and France even overtaking the United States.We also see that economic crises last much longer as measured by Real Feel GDP growth, up to a decade, compared to one or two years with the conventional measurement of growth.

Cet article d’Antonin Bergeaud et Gilbert Cette présente une analyse économique comparée des difficultés de recrutement dans les cinq plus grands pays de la zone euro. Les auteurs rappellent d’abord que ces difficultés sont généralement plus grandes dans les pays à faible taux de chômage (Allemagne, Pays-Bas), et qu’inversement elles sont moindres dans ceux qui ont un taux de chômage plus élevé (Italie, Espagne). Ils soulignent cependant que la France à cet égard est atypique, puisque les difficultés de recrutement y sont grandes alors que le taux de chômage reste élevé. Cela témoigne, affirment-ils, d’un désajustement particulier dans l’Hexagone entre l’offre et la demande de travail, qui peut résulter de différentes causes et diffère selon que les métiers sont plus ou moins qualifiés. Parmi les moins qualifiés, deux causes principales sont retenues : le niveau des rémunérations et les conditions de travail. Les conditions de travail relèvent, écrivent-ils, de la négociation collective qui ne peut être que favorable au progrès social. En revanche, s’agissant des salaires d’embauche, les auteurs soulignent, en s’appuyant notamment sur le taux d’emplois vacants, que ceux-ci sont insuffisamment attractifs en France, en comparaison des revenus de transfert associés au non-emploi. Ainsi affirment-ils que la réduction desdits transferts (indemnisation du chômage, revenu de solidarité active, réforme des retraites), comme cela se fait dans divers pays tels que le Danemark ou la Suède, permettrait d’améliorer en France le fonctionnement du marché du travail et serait bénéfique du point de vue économique. Leur propos est au cœur du débat que soulèvent les projets de réforme portés ces derniers mois par le gouvernement français. H.J.

We analyze the circular relationship between productivity (or wages) and hours worked. Different channels come into play in this circular relationship: productivity (or wages) impacts hours worked through either an income channel or a substitution channel, while returns to scale of hours worked depend on a fixed-cost channel or a fatigue channel. We estimate the two equations of this circular relationship, using the IV estimation method, on two separate datasets for advanced countries: a long-term (1890–2019) country panel database, and a country-industry panel for a shorter, more recent period (1995–2019). The main results are: (i) the income channel outweighs the substitution channel in the long term: increased productivity or higher wages reduce the number of hours worked; (ii) the fatigue channel outweighs the fixed-cost channel: a reduction in hours worked raises productivity (or hourly wages). According to our results, a productivity revival brought about by the digital revolution and resulting in the same productivity growth as was observed in the US from 1900 to 1975 would reduce hours worked to 25 h per week by the end of this century.

ABSTRACT Taking advantage of an original firm-level survey carried out by the Banque de France, we empirically investigate how the employment of ICT specialists (in-house and external) and the use of digital technologies (cloud and big data) have an impact on firm productivity and labor share. Our analysis relies on the survey responses in 2018 of 1,065 French firms belonging to the manufacturing sector and with at least 20 employees. To tackle potential endogeneity issues, we adopt an instrumental variable approach as proposed by Bartik (1991, Who Benefits from State and Local Economic Development Policies? Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.). The results of our cross-section estimations point to a large effect: ceteris paribus, the employment of ICT specialists and the use of digital technologies improve a firm’s labor productivity by about 23% and its total factor productivity by about 17%. Conversely, the employment of in-house ICT specialists and the use of big data both have a detrimental impact on labor share, of about 2.5 percentage points respectively.

This paper provides a tool to build climate change scenarios to forecast Gross Domestic Product (GDP), modelling both GDP damage due to climate change and the GDP impact of mitigating measures. It adopts a supply-side, long-term view, with 2060 and 2100 horizons. It is a global projection tool (30 countries/regions), with assumptions and results both at the world and the country/regional level. Five different types of energy inputs are taken into account according to their CO2 emission factors. Full calibration is possible at each stage, with estimated or literature-based default parameters. Compared to other models, it provides a comprehensive modelisation of Total Factor Productivity (TFP), which is the most significant determinant of the GDP projected path. We present simulation results of different energy policy scenarios. They illustrate both the "tragedy of the horizon" and the "tragedy of the commons", which call for a policy framework that adequately integrates a long run perspective, through a low-enough discount rate and an effective intergenerational solidarity as well as international cooperation.