Search results for "Productivity."
showing 10 items of 557 documents
Changes in the total costs of the English and Welsh water and sewerage industry: The decomposed effect of price and quantity inputs on efficiency
2020
Abstract Understanding what drives changes in regulated water companies' costs is of great relevance to water regulators. This study decomposes and estimates the change in total costs for a sample of ten water and sewerage companies in England and Wales from 1993 to 2016. The results demonstrate that companies' total costs increased over time due to increases in input prices and input quantity. Any gains obtained from the efficient allocation of resources and technical progress were lost due to mergers and technical inefficiency. Finally, we link our results with the regulatory cycle to evaluate the impact of the regulatory regime on companies' costs and discuss some policy implications.
The bureaucratic making of national culture in North-Western Ghana
2014
In this article I explore the making of national culture through bureaucratic routines in the Centre for National Culture in Wa, North-Western Ghana. I focus on an aspect of bureaucracy that is usually left aside: the productivity and creativity of bureaucratic routines. State, nation and culture are not fixed entities, but have to be constantly produced through processes of negotiation and meaning-making and through the continual reproduction of their boundaries and the categories that determine what is to be promoted or preserved. Bureaucratic routines and administrative processes are analysed as practices objectifying and nationalising culture and naturalising the boundaries and categori…
Improving the Reuse Process is Based on Understanding the Business and the Products: Four Case Studies
2002
The reuse of software engineering assets has been proposed as the most promising alternative for improving productivity and software quality. The improvement of reuse requires understanding of suitable reuse strategies and the software process. In four industrial cases the reuse process is analyzed for the purpose of its improvement and remarkable differences between successful processes are found. Those differences are due to differences in the products and businesses of the analyzed companies. In some cases the product line approach fits the business very well and high level of reuse can be achieved by using it. In other cases the black-box approach to reuse has turned out to suit the bus…
BIOCHARS IN SOILS: TOWARDS THE REQUIRED LEVEL OF SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING
2017
The special issue on Biochar as an Option for Sustainable Resource Management Key priorities in biochar research for future guidance of sustainable policy development have been identified by expert assessment within the COST Action TD1107. The current level of scientific understanding (LOSU) regarding the consequences of biochar application to soil were explored. Five broad thematic areas of biochar research were addressed: soil biodiversity and ecotoxicology, soil organic matter and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, soil physical properties, nutrient cycles and crop production, and soil remediation. The highest future research priorities regarding biochar’s effects in soils were: functional …
Productivity, R&D Spillovers and Educational Attainment*
2012
Economists have long agreed that the local availability of a more qualified workforce generates significant spillovers. This study suggests that these externalities may arise because plants by having access to a more qualified workforce at a regional level, can benefit more from R&D spillovers than those located in areas with less qualified workforce. This hypothesis is tested on a sample of British establishments drawn from the Annual Business Inquiry over the period 1997–2002. The main results are consistent with our expectations that the regional differences in the industry-level educational attainment of the workforce available to a plant will condition its capability of absorbing R&D s…
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…
Olley–Pakes productivity decomposition: computation and inference
2016
Summary We show how a moment-based estimation procedure can be used to compute point estimates and standard errors for the two components of the widely used Olley–Pakes decomposition of aggregate (weighted average) productivity. When applied to business level microdata, the procedure allows for autocovariance and heteroscedasticity robust inference and hypothesis testing about, for example, the coevolution of the productivity components in different groups of firms. We provide an application to Finnish firm level data and find that formal statistical inference casts doubt on the conclusions that one might draw on the basis of a visual inspection of the components of the decomposition.
The equal collective gains value in cooperative games
2021
AbstractThe property of equal collective gains means that each player should obtain the same benefit from the cooperation of the other players in the game. We show that this property jointly with efficiency characterize a new solution, called the equal collective gains value (ECG-value). We introduce a new class of games, the average productivity games, for which the ECG-value is an imputation. For a better understanding of the new value, we also provide four alternative characterizations of it, and a negotiation model that supports it in subgame perfect equilibrium.
Lieu de résidence et discrimination salariale
2010
Ziel dieses Artikels ist es, die Lohnabweichungen zwischen Jugendlichen, die in sensiblen städtischen Zonen wohnen, am Ende ihrer Ausbildung und denjenigen, die zwar nicht in einer solchen Zone leben, die aber in städtischen Einheiten mit solchen Zonen wohnen, unter Berücksichtigung möglicher Barrieren beim Zugang zu bestimmten Beschäftigungen und insbesondere zu den Arbeitsplätzen von Führungskräften zu untersuchen. In Anknüpfung an Brown, Moon und Zoloth (1980) schlagen wir eine Zerlegung der Lohnabweichungen vor, bei der die Möglichkeit einer Differenzierung beim Zugang zu bestimmten Beschäftigungen entsprechend der Art des Stadtviertels, in dem die Jugendlichen wohnen, berücksichtigt wi…
The Effects of Labor and Product Market Reforms: The Role of Macroeconomic Conditions and Policies
2018
The paper estimates the dynamic macroeconomic effects of labor and product market reforms on output, employment and productivity, and explores how these vary with prevailing macroeconomic conditions and policies. We apply a local projection method to a new dataset of major country- and country-sector-level reform shocks in various areas of labor market institutions and product market regulation covering 26 advanced economies over the past four decades. Product market reforms are found to raise productivity and output, but gains materialize only slowly. The impact of labor market reforms is primarily on employment, but it varies across types of reforms and depends on overall business cycle c…