Search results for " factor productivity"
showing 10 items of 46 documents
The Determinants of Retail Productivity: A Critical Review of the Evidence
2009
This paper discusses the literature on the established determinants of productivity in the retail sector. It also draws attention to some neglected strands of research which provide useful insights into strategies that could allow productivity enhancements in this area of the economy. To date, very few attempts have been made to integrate different specialisms in order to explain what drives productivity in retail. Here this paper rectifies this omission by putting together studies from economics, geography, knowledge management and employment studies. It is the authors’ view that quantitative studies of retail productivity should focus on total factor productivity in retailing as the resul…
Productivity, Ownership & National Chains: Evidence from the British Retail Sector
2008
This paper investigates whether foreign-owned retailers operating in the British retail sector perform differently than domestic-owned firms with diverse national presence. Using simultaneous quantile regression techniques we test for any sign of performance gaps. The findings suggest that foreign ownership turns out to be a weak explanatory factor of differences in performance across retailers. Only when firms in the upper quantiles of TFP are compared, the role of foreign ownership gains statistical significance, although with exceptions. On the other hand, firms able to expand their infrastructure across Great Britain possess a productivity advantage over more local retailers. This impli…
COMPLEMENTARITY BETWEEN LOCAL KNOWLEDGE AND INTERNATIONALIZATION IN REGIONAL TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS
2006
Trade, foreign direct investment, and inter-regional R&D spillovers facilitate competition, the spread of knowledge, and the adoption of more advanced technologies, which in turn hastens total factor productivity (TFP) growth. The spread of these efficiency gains from internationalization requires a sufficient local knowledge to enable them to be adapted to the domestic productive environment. Thus, higher local knowledge and internationalization will lead to TFP growth, and the greater the complementarity between variables the higher the TFP growth. We test the complementarity hypothesis using Spanish regional data over the period 1980–1995 in which both regional local knowledge and intern…
The impact of the Great Recession on TFP convergence among EU countries
2017
ABSTRACTThis article provides evidence on the effect of the Great Recession on productivity convergence among European Union (EU) economies. We use firm data, aggregated at the country-year level, to analyse the evolution of beta-convergence on total factor productivity (TFP) for 2003–2014. We obtain a positive impact of the recession on TFP (unconditional and conditional) beta-convergence across EU economies. These results support the existence of a catching-up process within the EU during the recent financial crisis. Other macroeconomic and institutional characteristics are important in fostering TFP growth, namely R&D intensity and quality of governance.
Aggregate uncertainty and sectoral productivity growth: The role of credit constraints
2016
Abstract We show that an increase in aggregate uncertainty—measured by stock market volatility—reduces productivity growth more in industries that depend heavily on external finance. The mechanism at play is that during periods of high uncertainty, firms that are credit constrained switch the composition of investment by reducing productivity-enhancing investment—such as on ICT capital—which is more subject to liquidity risks (Aghion et al., 2010). The effect is larger during recessions, when financing constraints are more likely to be binding, than during expansions. Our statistical method—a difference-in-difference approach using productivity growth of 25 industries from 18 advanced econo…
The Role of Capital Accumulation in the Evolution of Total Factor Productivity in Spain
2017
GDP growth in Spain was strong for much of the last half century, whereas the country’s productivity performance during these years has been mediocre. The reasons for this situation have frequently been analysed with the focus on labour productivity. But, as this article highlights, the evolution of capital productivity should also be taken into account when looking for explanations for poor productivity performance. This article analyses the sources of growth in the Spanish economy, in comparison with major economies, and takes into account the effects that the improvements in the measurement of inputs (labour and capital) have on TFP estimates. Once problems are identified and the role pl…
Convergence in OECD countries: technical change, efficiency and productivity
1998
The aim of this study is to analyze labor productivity convergence in the countries of the OECD over the period 1965-90. A non-parametric frontier approach is used to calculate the Malmquist productivity index. By breaking it down, the contribution to the growth of labor productivity of technical progress, of changes in efficiency, and of the accumulation of inputs per worker are quantified. Unlike other studies, the results obtained show that technical change has worked against labor productivity convergence, since it has always been greater in the countries with higher labor productivity. El trabajo tiene como objetivo básico analizar la contribución de las distintas fuentes del crecimien…
NEW EU MEMBER COUNTRIES ARE PHASING OUT LABOR-INTENSIVE ACTIVITIES: AN ECONOMETRIC APPROACH
2012
This paper deals with the process of industrial development that has been unfolding in Central and East-European Countries during the last two decades, with special focus on changes in international specialization induced by successive shifts in comparative advantage. As it was to be expected, these advances have gradually improved the respective countries’ exports structure, the most important mutation residing in the gradual abandoning of subcontracting agreements – mostly confined to assembly-of-imported-inputs – and the expansion of the production of knowledge and human capital-intensive goods and services. European integration has most certainly been acting as a catalyst for this proce…
Is the productivity premium of internationalized firms technology-driven?
2020
AbstractWe ask whether the productivity advantage of internationalized firms documented by the international trade literature can be interpreted most accurately in terms of proximity to the “technological frontier”. We answer in the affirmative using a methodology (based on mixture models) of unbundling technology and total factor productivity (TFP) by estimating “technology-specific” production function parameters. Exploiting detailed data provided by the EFIGE database (a sample of firms distributed across Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and the UK), we find technology gaps (with respect to the frontier) more than three times larger than the TFP gaps on average. We also f…
Unbundling Technology Adoption andtfpat the Firm Level: Do Intangibles Matter?
2015
We use a panel of European firms to investigate the relationship between intangible assets and productivity. We distinguish between total factor productivity (tfp) and technology adoption, whereas standard estimations consider only a notion of productivity that conflates the two effects. Although we are unable to address simultaneity, we allow for the existence of multiple technologies within sectors through a mixture model approach. We find that intangible assets have nonnegligible effects that both push firms toward better technologies (technology adoption effects) and allow for more efficient exploitation of a given technology (tfp effects).