Search results for "productivity."
showing 10 items of 557 documents
Production risk, risk aversion and the determination of risk attitudes among Spanish rice producers
2011
Agricultural production is subject to risk and the attitudes of producers toward risk will influence input choices insofar as these affect production risk. Risk attitudes in turn may be affected by certain socioeconomic characteristics of producers. Using 2004 survey data from a cross-section of 130 Spanish rice farms, we estimate risk-aversion coefficients of farmers and investigate the influence of a series of socioeconomic variables on their risk attitudes. Our results show that farmers exhibit risk-averse behavior and that risk attitudes are related to a series of socioeconomic characteristics. In particular, the belief that the farm will continue after the producer retires is found to …
Sheepskin Effects in the Spanish Labour Market: A Public–Private Sector Analysis
2005
ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to contrast the nature of the effect of education, Human Capital or Screening, in the Spanish labour market. We use the Hungerford and Solon methodology to distinguish between the returns to schooling from mere years of schooling as a reflection of their productive–enhancing contribution (human capital) and the returns to schooling from academic certificates as signals of the individual’s ability (sheepskin effects). We separate our data into public and private sector workers. In the public sector the institutional restriction in the access and in the wage settings might force certificate rewards. Those not necessarily should be interpreted as sheepskin eff…
Temporary contracts, employment protection and skill: A simple model
2008
Abstract We construct a theoretical labor market that incorporates skill differences across workers to identify under which conditions temporary contracts are a way to access to permanency. Firing costs and unemployment benefits increase the threshold productivity above which workers access to permanency.
TEMPORARY CONTRACTS, EMPLOYMENT PROTECTION AND SKILL: AN APPLICATION TO SPAIN*
2011
In this paper we explain the different conversion patterns of temporary contracts by the impact of employment protection in combination with differences in productivity between workers. We use longitudinal survey data from individuals to estimate a competing risks model with multispells for Spain. The model includes correlated unobserved determinants in the transition rates to deal with selectivity. We find that workers with higher levels of education have a stronger probability of finding a permanent job. In contrast, low-educated workers have a stronger probability of ending in unemployment or another temporary contract. Furthermore, we show the importance of employment protection in affe…
Work Incentive and Productivity in Spain
2016
Work incentives are closely related to production performance. This paper presents evidence that the value added of a firm increases when relative labor costs rise, or the level of unemployment increases. Both circumstances imply evidence in favor of the efficiency wage model. This theory is consistent with the views of many managers and personal administrators, who tend to ascribe primary importance to wage setting as an incentive to increase effort. We use a micro panel data set of Spanish manufacturing firms, during the period 2004–2009, to simultaneously estimate a stochastic frontier of a firm’s value added and the inefficiency determinants. The data source is published in the Spanish …
Does Firm Size Affect Self-selection and Learning-by-Exporting?
2010
The trade literature has long discussed the existence of some benefits attributed to exporting, among others, the improvement of firm productivity. This paper examines whether firm size plays a role in this supposedly favourable relationship between exporting and total factor productivity (TFP). To examine this, we investigate, separately for large and small firms, whether firms starting to export perform better ex ante (self-selection) than non-exporting firms and, conditional on this fact, if they are also more productive ex post (learning-by-exporting). With this purpose, we use both stochastic dominance and matching techniques. The dataset is a representative sample of Spanish manufactu…
Renewable electricity producing technologies and metal depletion: A sensitivity analysis using the EROI
2015
International audience; More and more attention is being paid to renewable technologies because they are seen as a great opportunity to disengage our society from its dependence on fossil fuels. Such flow-based energy resources that rely on solarenergy are supposed to lead us toward a sustainable energy future. However, because of their high capitalintensity, renewable technologies require large amounts of matter, including both common and rare metals.These metals require energy for their production, and more specifically for their extraction. The energy costassociated with metal extraction is linked to mineral ore grade, meaning that as depletion progresses, energycost increases. In additi…
Directional distance functions and environmental regulation
2005
Abstract In this paper we use directional technology distance functions to evaluate the impact of environmental regulations on firms’ performance. Following Fare et al. [Fare, R., Grosskopf, S., Lovell, C.A.K., Pasurka, C., 1989. Multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable: a nonparametric approach. The Review of Economics and Statistics 71, 90–98.], we construct an index that measures opportunity costs for individual firms arising from regulations that prevent free disposal of wastes. The methodology is applied to a sample of Spanish producers of ceramic pavements. We assume that firms maximise desirable output simultaneously reducing inputs, with no change in t…
Heterogeneous effects of sustainable agriculture practices: micro-evidence from Malawi
2020
Abstract Are the effects of sustainable agricultural practices heterogeneous across agro-ecology and wealth in Malawi? Would a wealth-enhancing policy be associated with increased effectiveness of these practices? Focusing on a nationally representative set of Malawian agricultural households, the article answers the above questions by employing plot-level panel data matched with a set of geo-referenced rainfall and temperature records. The findings suggest a positive correlation between aggregate yield and the adoption of organic fertilizer. A similar result holds for legume intercropping and for hybrid seeds, which are associated to reductions in yield volatility between the two waves. Ne…
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).