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We study whether student-advisor gender and race composition matters for publication productivity of Ph.D. students in South Africa. We consider all Ph.D. students in STEM graduating between 2000 and 2014, after the recent systematic introduction of doctoral programs in this country. We investigate the joint effects of gender and race for the whole sample and looking separately at the sub-samples of (1) white-white; (2) black-black; and (3) black-white student-advisor couples. We find significant productivity differences between male and female students. These disparities are more pronounced for female students working with male advisors when looking at the joint effects of gender and race for the white-white and black-black student-advisor pairs. We also explore whether publication productivity differences change significantly for students with a high, medium, or low “productivity-profile”. We find that female productivity gaps are U-shaped over the range of productivity. Female students working with male advisors have more persistent productivity gaps over the productivity distribution, while female students with a high (or low) “productivity-profile” studying with female advisors are as productive as male students with similar “productivity-profile” studying with male advisors.

Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) is a life-threatening fungal infection occurring in immunocompromised patients such as HIV-positive patients with low CD4 cell count or patients under heavy immunosuppressive therapy. We report the case of a 59-year-old male with severe diffuse cutaneous systemic sclerosis presenting with asthenia, dry cough and worsening shortness of breath for the last 15 days. Biological studies were remarkable for PTH-independent severe hypercalcemia with low 25-hydroxyvitamin D and a paradoxically elevated 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D. Early bronchoalveolar lavage allowed for PCP diagnosis and targeted treatment. We discuss the underlying physiopathology and difficulties regarding prophylaxis and treatment.

International audience; This analysis proposes new measures of rent creation and rent sharing and assesses their impact on productivity on cross-country-industry panel data. We find first that: (1) anticompetitive product market regulations positively affect rent creation and (2) employment protection legislation boosts hourly wages, particularly for low-skill workers. However, we find no significant impact of this employment legislation on rent sharing, as the hourly wage increases are offset by a negative impact on hours worked. Second, using regulation indicators as instruments, we find that rent creation and rent sharing both have a substantial negative impact on total factor productivity. (JEL E22, E24, O30, L50, O43, O47, C23)

The publication gender gap in science has been extensively studied. Although women have been found to be less productive than men, little is known about the reasons behind gender differences. Unique longitudinal data collected by surveying a large sample of French physicists gave us the opportunity to investigate the role of family characteristics over time. Using panel data econometrics, we confirm the existence of an average gender gap of about two-thirds of a journal article per year, and about one-third when taking into account several important control variables such as age and career characteristics. We find that female scientists suffer an average productivity loss of about one article when they have a young child, while male scientists suffer an insignificant loss. We also find that female scientists benefit from having large families, with a productivity gain of 0.63 articles per year per child.

This article presents empirical evidence on the impacts of product innovation, export, and other important factors on employment growth in Chinese manufacturing industries over the period 2000-2006. The results of our analysis show that the overall demand effect of firms' output growth on their average yearly employment growth amounts to 7.0%, of which 3.5%, 1.2%, 1.6%, and 0.7% correspond to the output growth of, respectively, domestic-old, export-old, domestic-new and export-new products. The displacement effect from process and organizational innovations, as measured by firms' productivity efforts to catch up with industry regional productivity frontiers, accounts for a 5.4% average reduction of yearly employment growth. We also observe a trade-off between growth of productivity and growth of employment, which could have been on average higher by 2% for productivity (16.8% instead of 14.8%) and lower by 2% for employment (1.4% instead of 3.4%).

In this study, we examine the promotion dynamics at the French Institute of Physics (INP) in CNRS, one of the largest European public research organizations. We construct a long panel combining a dataset on the career histories of INP scientists with survey data. Using event history analysis, we find that, having controlled for scientific productivity, female and male physicists have the same promotion rate from junior to senior positions. However, we also find that promotion factors such as family characteristics, mentoring, professional network, research responsibilities have different impacts on female and male researchers.

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.

Background Early access for routine testing with the Alinity c clinical chemistry system (Abbot Laboratories) presented the opportunity to characterize the analytical performance of multiple analytes across clinical laboratories in Europe. Methods A total of 8 laboratories from 7 European countries evaluated 10 high-volume chemistry assays on the Alinity c system for imprecision, linearity, and accuracy by method comparison to the routine ARCHITECT (Abbott Laboratories) method. Results Within-run precision was less than 4% coefficient of variation (CV), with total imprecision less than 5.6% CV for 5- and 20-day evaluations. Linearity met expectations, and method comparison showed strong correlation between the Alinity and ARCHITECT methods, with overall linear correlation coefficient between 0.980 to 1.000 and slopes of the regression line between 0.963 and 1.034. Mean percentage difference between the results of assays run on the ARCHITECT and the Alinity ranged between -1.7% and 2.15%. Conclusions Our results demonstrated acceptable key analytical performance across all assays tested at each participating laboratory.

Our study aims to assess the actual importance of the two main channels via which upstream anti-competitive sector regulations are usually considered to impact productivity growth, i.e. by acting as a disincentive to business investments in R&D and in ICT. We estimate the specific impacts of these two channels and their shares in the total impact as opposed to alternative channels of investments in other forms of intangible capital that we cannot explicitly consider for lack of appropriate data such as improvements in skills, management and organization. To achieve this, we specify an extended production function explicitly relating productivity to R&D and ICT capital as well as to upstream regulations, and we specify two factor demand functions relating R&D and ICT capital to upstream regulations. These relations are estimated on the basis of an unbalanced panel of 15 OECD countries and 13 industries over the period 1987-2007. Confirming the results of previous similar studies, our estimates find that the impact of upstream regulations on total factor productivity can be sizeable, and they provide evidence that a good part of the total impact, though not a predominant one, is transmitted through investments in both R&D and ICT, and particularly the former

We explore in this note different structural models of the impact of process and product innovation on firms' demand and production cost functions. We find that the introduction of process and product innovations affects them differently as could be expected. Both product and process innovation shift forward the demand for the products of the firm. Process innovation reduces production marginal cost, but not always. A possibility, that we cannot prove or reject with the current specification of our models and available data, is that process innovation associated with product innovation raise marginal cost. Interestingly, we also find that advertising significantly augments demand but does not affect production marginal cost. To obtain broader conclusions, richer data will be needed allowing an enlargement of the model, in which process and product innovations could be specified distinctively and well identified. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Since Crepon, Duguet, and Mairesse published their ground-breaking article ('Research, Innovation and Productivity: An Econometric Analysis at the Firm Level', 1998), the CDM framework has known a large diffusion, despite being published in a non-indexed journal. The present study is an exploration of the spread and recombination of 'knowledge' in the 'CDM universe', comprising all papers in Scopus indexed journals citing CDM or/and CDM cited papers. We assess first the speed and range of diffusion of CDM and investigate next the 'origins' and further 'genealogical' make up of the knowledge recombinations within the CDM universe. We find that CDM is cited by a growing number of papers, which spread over a variety of fields, and that it compares very well with the most cited comparable articles in indexed journals in its domain of research. We further find that the CDM universe is mainly constituted of three large clusters and for each of them we are able to identify knowledge paths going from the CDM and earlier cited papers to the subsequent main citing papers. We intend to provide a detailed interpretation of these findings in future work.

This article tests whether product and process innovations increase employment in three european countries—france, germany, and the netherlands—and in the people’s republic of china on the basis of the same underlying theoretical framework and comparable harmonized micro data. The data pertain to the period 2002–2004 and cover the manufacturing and services industries in the three european countries, and to the period 1999–2006 and only the manufacturing industries in china. Process innovation does not play a significant role, whereas non-innovation-related efficiency improvements in the production of unchanged products tend to reduce employment. In contrast, product innovation stimulates employment, the compensation effect via increased demand dominating the displacement effect. The net effect of product innovation and the net growth in total employment are comparable in the two regions.

What is the impact of labour market regulations as measured by the OECD indicator of employment protection legislation (EPL) on capital and skill composition? Precisely, this study investigates the effects of changes in EPL on changes in four types of capital and three components of labour skill. They include construction, non-ICT, ICT, and R&D capital components on the one hand, and low-, medium-, and highly-skilled labour on the other. Our analysis is grounded on a large country–industry panel dataset of fourteen OECD countries, and eighteen manufacturing and market service industries, from 1988 to 2007. It shows that strengthening EPL lowers ICT capital and, even more severely, R&D capital relative to non-ICT and construction capital; it also brings down low-skilled relative to highly-skilled workers’ employment. These results suggest that structural reforms for more labour flexibility could have a favourable impact on firms’ R&D investment and hiring of low-skilled workers.

The extent to which employers share rents with their employees is typically assessed by estimating the responsiveness of workers’ wages on firms’ ability to pay. This paper compares rent-sharing estimates using such a wage determination regression with estimates based on a productivity regression that relies on standard firm-level input and output data. Using a large matched firm-worker panel data sample for French manufacturing, we find that the respective industry distributions of the rent-sharing estimates are correlated and slightly overlap, but are significantly different on average. Precisely, if we only rely on the firm-level information, we obtain an average rent-sharing estimate of roughly 0.30 for the productivity regression and 0.17 for the wage determination regression. When we also take advantage of the worker-level information to control for unobserved worker ability in the model of wage determination, we find as expected a lower average value of 0.10.

This analysis proposes new measures of rent creation or (notional) mark-up and workers’ share of rents on cross-country-industry panel data. While the usual measures of mark-up rate implicitly assume perfect labor markets, our approach relaxes this assumption, and takes into account that part of firms’ rent created in an industry is shared with workers to an extent which can vary with their skills. Our results are based on a cross-country-industry panel covering 14 OECD countries and 19 industries over the 1985-2005 period. In a first part of our analysis we draw on OECD indicators of product and labor market (anticompetitive) regulations to test how they are related to our new measures of mark-up and rent-sharing. We find that anti-competitive Non-Manufacturing Regulations (NMR) affect mark-up rates positively, and hence firms’ rent creation and workers’ share of rent, whereas Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) has no impact on rent creation, but boosts workers’ wages per hour. However, we observe that these wage increases are offset by a negative impact from EPL on hours worked per output unit, leading to a non-significant impact of EPL on workers’ share of rents. The effects of EPL for low-skilled workers appear to be more pronounced than those for medium-skilled workers, both being much greater than for highly-skilled workers. In the second part of our analysis, we estimate the impacts of our new measures on Total Factor Productivity (TFP) in the framework of a straightforward regression model. We use the OECD regulations indicators as relevant instrument to take care of endogeneity and to make sure that the resulting estimates assess the proper regulation impacts of rent creation and sharing without being biased by other confounding effects. We find that less competition in the product and labor markets as assessed by our measures of mark-up and workers’ share of rents have both substantial negative impacts on TFP.

The article investigates the effects of Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) on capital and skills according to the intensity of international competition. Grounded on a panel data sample for 14 OECD countries and 18 industries from 1988 to 2007, and a difference-in-difference approach, we find that strengthening EPL : (i) leads to a capital-labour substitution in favour of non ICT non R&D capital to the detriment of employment, this effect being mitigated in industries highly exposed to international competition ; (ii) lowers ICT capital and, even more severely, R&D capital relatively to other capital components ; and (iii) works at the relative disadvantage of low-skilled workers. Strengthening EPL can therefore be an impediment to organizational and so technological change and risk taking on globalized markets. An illustrative simulation suggests that structural reforms weakening EPL could have a significant favorable impact on firms’ ICT and R&D investment and on hiring low-skilled workers., Cette Gilbert, Lopez Jimmy, Mairesse Jacques. Employment Protection Legislation Impacts on Capital and Skills Composition. In: Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, n°503-504, 2018. pp. 109-122.

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the 'Journal of Comparative Economics' , 2015, 43(2), 290-322. Allowing for three labor market settings (perfect competition or right-to-manage bargaining, efficient bargaining and monopsony), this paper relies on an extension of Hall's econometric framework for estimating simultaneously price-cost margins and scale economies. Using an unbalanced panel of 17,653 firms over the period 1986-2001 in France, 8,725 firms over the period 1994-2006 in Japan and 7,828 firms over the period 1993-2008 in the Netherlands, we first apply two procedures to classify 30 comparable manufacturing industries in 6 distinct regimes that differ in terms of the type of competition prevailing in product and labor markets. For each of the three predominant regimes in each country, we then investigate industry differences in the estimated product and labor market imperfections and scale economies. We find important regime differences across the three countries and also observe differences in the levels of product and labor market imperfection s and scale economies within regimes.

International audience; In this article we follow, over his long career, the evolution of the reflections of Edmond Malinvaud on economic “science” and its relationship with the “problem” of statistical induction. To do so we largely rely on his own words by quoting his many articles addressing these issues. We consider in turn his views on statistical methods and structural econometrics, on apriorism versus empiricism, the Koopmans-Vining controversy on measurement with or without theory, econometric methods and the challenge of modelling, the Popperian temptation of a falsifiable economic science, the uneasy alliance between induction and expertise, understanding and advising. We conclude with Malinvaud's views on eclecticism, which he deems to be the only position able to meet, despite its rapid progress, the “advisory imperative” characterizing economics.

This paper provides evidence of the existence and determinants of the publication productivity gender gap in Mexico at the individual level, and its consequences for the Mexican scientific system and productivity at both the individual discipline and the aggregate levels. The paper specifies and performs a panel data econometric analysis based on a sample of Mexican researchers who are members of the National System of Researchers (SNI) of Mexico in the period 2002-13. It corrects for a selectivity bias: the existence of periods with no (or low-quality) publications, and endogeneity bias: promotion to higher academic ranks. It defines and implements counterfactual simulations to assess the magnitude of macro-impacts of existing gender gaps and illustrate the potential effects of a range of policy scenarios. The results show no significant gender gaps for an average SNI researcher. Moreover, after correcting for endogeneity and selectivity biases, the study finds that the average female researcher in public universities is around 8 percent more productive than her male peers, with most of the observed productivity being explained by gender differentials in the propensity to have periods of no (or low) quality publication. Barriers to promotion to higher academic ranks are highest among females in public research centers (PRCs). The study's macro scenarios on promotion practices, selectivity, collaboration, and age show that eliminating gender gaps would increase aggregate productivity by an average of 7 percent for university women and 9 percent for women in research centers.

The Crépon-Duguet-Mairesse 1998 article, known as CDM, initiated a structural econometric framework to analyze the relationships among research, innovation and productivity, which has been estimated most generally on the basis of cross-sectional innovation survey-type data. Some econometric implementations of the CDM approach have suggested that such data give useful but imprecise measures of the innovation output (share of innovative sales), and to a lesser degree of the innovation input (R&D). These ‘measurement errors’ may result in attenuation biases of the estimated R&D and innovation impact elasticities in the two basic CDM ‘roots’ relations of R&D to innovation and innovation to productivity, as well as in the extended production function à la Griliches linking directly R&D to productivity. Using a panel of three waves of the French Community Innovation Survey (CIS), we assess these biases and the magnitude of the underlying measurement errors, assuming mainly that they are ‘white noise’ errors. We do so by comparing two pairs of usual panel estimators (Total and Between) in both the cross-sectional and time dimensions of the data (Levels and Differences). We find large measurement errors on innovation output in the innovation–productivity equation, resulting in large attenuation biases in the related elasticity parameter. We also find smaller but sizeable measurement errors on R&D, with significant attenuation biases in the corresponding elasticity estimates, in the R&D–innovation equation and the extended production function. Simulations suggest that the measurement errors on innovation and R&D are unaffected by similar measurement errors on the capital variable.

The macroeconomic empirical literature based on three-dimensional country- industry-year panel data, such as the widely used OECD STAN and EUKLEMS databases, has become extremely abundant, providing more observations for studies previously investigated on two-dimensional country-year panels. However, a large part of this literature does not take advantage of the development of panel data methods to deal with heterogeneity and dynamic and non-stationarity issues. We explain in this chapter how one can put them into practice and circumvent the lack of variability left in the data once one controls for simple and two-way interacted fixed effects in these industry-country-year panels. We illustrate what to do in the context of two econometric analyses, in which we first try to estimate the productivity impacts of ICT and R&D, and second the productivity impacts of product market anticompetitive regulations.

In year 1998, the seminal paper Research Innovation and Productivity: An Econometric Analysis at the Firm Level was published in this journal. The empirical framework, following on ideas in the research of Zvi Griliches at the NBER and commonly labeled CDM (the acronym of the three authors’ names, Crépon, Duguet and Mairesse) is one of the most influential contributions in recent literature on economics of innovation. The original CDM paper and papers inspired by its framework have received hundreds of citations in the empirical innovation literature. Whether directly linked or not to the CDM framework, the flow of studies improving on and enlarging the scope and methods of the empirical literature on R&D, innovation and productivity is continuing. Some of them, for example, focus on financing innovation, innovation and employment, innovation and trade, competition, or intellectual property; some adopt a managerial perspective, while others prefer an innovation system approach in a Schumpeterian tradition, etc. This introduction to the special issue of EINT surveys a collection of 12 papers on the CDM model by 25 authors from eight countries. The papers take stock of the evolution of research based on the original CDM model launched 20 years ago, linking it to the previous literature, and proposing developments and generalizations of it in various dimensions. QC 20170217

We study the impact of process and product innovations introduced by firms on employment growth with random samples of manufacturing and services from France, Germany, Spain and the UK for 1998-2000, totaling about 20,000 companies. We develop and estimate a model relating firms' and industry's employment to innovation, that leads us to the conclusions that follow. Trend increases in productivity reinforced by process innovation are an important source of reduction of employment requirements for a given output, but the growth of demand for the old products tends to overcompensate these displacement effects. The switch of production towards new products does not reduce employment requirements, and the growth of the demand for the new products is the strongest force behind employment creation. Reallocation due to business stealing is estimated at a maximum of one third of the net employment created by product innovators. The growth of employment originated from the market expansion induced by the new products can be as important as another third.

This article presents an econometric analysis of the direct effects of the R&D tax credit (RTC) on private R&D in France and proposes an ex ante evaluation of the major reform implemented in 2008. We first estimate an error correction model of a dynamic R&D demand function on a large panel data of R&D doing firms, obtaining a preferred estimate of -0.4 for the long run elasticity of the user cost of R&D capital. We then perform a micro-simulation of the effects of the 2008 RTC reform that shows that the implicit long run budget multiplier would be about 0.7. Copyright 2013 Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved, Oxford University Press.

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the Journal of Applied Econometrics, 2013, 28(1), 1-46. 10.1002/jae.1256 Embedding the efficient bargaining model into the R. Hall (1988) approach for estimating price-cost margins shows that both imperfections in the product and labor markets generate a wedge between factor elasticities in the production function and their corresponding shares in revenue. This article investigates these two sources of discrepancies both at the industry level and the firm level using an unbalanced panel of 10646 French firms in 38 manufacturing industries over the period 1978-2001. By estimating standard production functions and comparing the estimated factor elasticities for labor and materials and their shares in revenue, we are able to derive estimates of average price-cost mark-up and extent of rent sharing parameters. For manufacturing as a whole, our estimates of these parameters are of an order of magnitude of 1.17 and 0.44 respectively. Our industry-level results indicate that industry differences in these parameters and in the underlying estimated factor elasticities and shares are quite sizeable. Since firm production function, behavior and market environment are very likely to vary even within industries, we also investigate firm-level heterogeneity in estimated mark-up and rent-sharing parameters. To determine the degree of true heterogeneity in these parameters, we adopt the P.A. Swamy (1970) methodology ailowing to correct the observed variance in the firm-level estimates from their sampling variance. The median of the firm estimates of the price-cost mark-up ignoring labor market imperfections is of 1.10, while as expected it is higher of 1.20 when taking them into account and the median of the corresponding firm estimates of the extent of rent sharing is of 0.62. The Swamy corresponding robust estimates of true dispersion are of about 0.18, 0.37 and 0.35, showing indeed very sizeable within-industry firm heterogeneity. We find that firm size, capital intensity, distance to the industry technology frontier and investing in R&D seem to account for a significant part of this heterogeneity.

We construct company panel datasets for manufacturing firms in Belgium, France, Germany and the UK, covering the period 1978-89. These datasets are used to estimate a range of empirical investment equations, and to investigate the role played by financial factors in each country. A robust finding is that cash flow or profits terms appear to be both statistically and quantitatively more significant in the UK than in the three continental European countries. This is consistent with the suggestion that financial constraints on investment may be relatively severe in the more market-oriented UK financial system.

We report the first laboratory-confirmed Zika virus (ZIKV) infection in a Belgian traveler after a three week holiday in Guatemala, December 2015. This case along with other imported cases into Europe emphases once again the need for accurate diagnostic tools for this rapidly emerging virus. The challenge is to diagnose patients in the acute phase, which appears short, as serological testing is complicated by cross-reactivity, vaccination status and scarce availability of specific ZIKV tests.

On the basis of a country*industry unbalanced panel data sample for 14 OECD countries and 18 industries covering the years 1988 to 2007, this study proposes an econometric investigation of the effects of the OECD Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) indicator on four components of total capital and for two skill components of total labor. Relying on a difference-in-difference econometric approach, we find that an increase in EPL has (i) positive and significant effects on the non-ICT capital - labor ratio and the share of high-skill labor; (ii) non-significant effects on the ICT capital – labor ratio; (iii) negative and significant effects for R&D capital – labor ratio and the share of low-skilled labor. These results suggest that firms consider that the strengthening of Employment Protection Legislation is equivalent to a rise in the cost of labour, resulting in capital-to-labour substitution in favour of non-ICT capital and working at the disadvantage of low-skill relatively to high-skill workers. They indicate to the contrary that structural reforms for more labour flexibility weakening this legislation could have a favourable impact on firms’ R&D investment and their hiring of low-skill workers.

International audience; This study is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to infer the consequences on productivity entailed by anticompetitive regulations in product and labor markets through their impacts on production prices and wages. Results show that changes in production prices and wages at country*industry levels are informative about the creation of rents impeding productivity in different ways and to different extents. A simulation based on OECD regulation indicators suggests that nearly all countries could expect sizeable gains in multifactor productivity from the implementation of large structural reform programs changing anticompetitive regulation practices on product and labor markets.

The article examines the determinants of scientific productivity (number of articles and journals' impact factor) for a panel of about 3600 French and Italian academic physicists active in 2004--2005. Endogeneity problems concerning promotion and productivity are addressed by specifying a generalized Tobit model, in which a selection probit equation accounts for the individual scientist's probability of promotion to her present rank, and a productivity regression estimates the effects of age, gender, cohort of entry, and collaboration characteristics, conditional on the scientist's rank. We find that the size and international nature of collaborative projects and co-authors' past productivity have very significant impacts on current productivity, while age, gender, and past productivity are also influential determinants of both productivity and probability of promotion. Furthermore we show that the stop and go policies of recruitment and promotion, typical of the Italian and French centralized academic systems of governance, can leave significant long-lasting cohort effects on research productivity. Copyright 2011 The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.

The present study contributes to the analysis of economic growth by comparing labour ant total factor productivity (TFP) in France, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States in the very long run (since 1890) and in the medium run (since 1980). During the past century, the United States has overtaken the United Kingdom and became the leading world economy. During the last 25 years, productivity growth has also known contrasted developments in the four countries, in particular as a result of an unequal growth of information and communication technology (ICT) investments. The past 120 years have been characterised by: (i) rapid economic growth and large productivity gains in the four countries; (ii) a decline in productivity in the United Kingdom relative to the United States, and to a lesser extent also relative to France and Japan until the second world war (WW2), and its subsequent come-back; (iii) the remarkable catching-up of the United States by France and Japan after WW2, which was however interrupted in the case of Japan during the 1990s. The contribution of capital deepening -as it can be measured- accounts for a large share of these different performances, with an increasing share of ICT capital in the last 25 years. This contribution varies considerably over time and across the four countries, and it is always less important, except in Japan, than that of the unmeasured factors underlying TFP, such as labour skills, technical and organisational changes and knowledge spillovers. Most recently (in 2006), before the current world crisis, hourly labour productivity levels are slightly higher in France than in the United States, and significantly lower in the United Kingdom (by roughly 10%) and even more in Japan (30%), while TFP levels are very close in France, the United Kingdom and the United States, but much lower (40%) in Japan.

Innovation in SMEs exhibits some peculiar features that most traditional indicators of innovation activity do not capture. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a structural model of innovation which incorporates information on innovation success from firm surveys along with the usual R&D expenditures and productivity measures. We then apply the model to data on Italian SMEs from the "Survey on Manufacturing Firms" conducted by Mediocredito-Capitalia covering the period 1995-2003. The model is estimated in steps, following the logic of firms' decisions and outcomes: in the first, R&D intensity is linked to a set of firm and market characteristics. We find that international competition fosters R&D intensity, especially for high-tech firms. Firm size, R&D intensity, along with investment in equipment enhances the likelihood of having both process and product innovation. Both these kinds of innovation have a positive impact on firm's productivity, especially process innovation. Among SMEs, larger and older firms seem to be less productive.

This article jointly estimates price-cost mark-ups and union bargaining power of manufacturing firms in France, Belgium and Chile. Our GMM results provide strong evidence of price-cost mark-ups being underestimated when labour market imperfections are ignored, corresponding to the omission of the part of product rents captured by the workers.

The past 120 years have been characterised by: (i) rapid economic growth and large productivity gains in the four countries; (ii) a decline in productivity in the United Kingdom relative to the United States, and to a lesser extent also relative to France and Japan until the second world war (WW2), and its subsequent come-back; (iii) the remarkable catching-up of the United States by France and Japan after WW2, which was however interrupted in the case of Japan during the 1990s. The contribution of capital deepening accounts for a large share of these different performances, with an increasing share of ICT capital in the last 25 years. In 2006, before the current world crisis, hourly labour productivity levels are slightly higher in France than in the United States, and significantly lower in the United Kingdom and even more in Japan, while TFP levels are very close in France, the United Kingdom and the United States, but much lower in Japan. JEL Classification: O47, O57, E22, J24, N10.

International audience; The theory of endogenous growth and the geography and growth synthesis both consider that local growth and spatial concentration of economic activities emanate from localised knowledge spillovers (Lucas 1988; Martin and Ottaviano 1999). Since the end of the 1980's, the spatial dimension of knowledge diffusion has been investigated from an empirical point of view, and the existence and role of local spillovers has been generally confirmed (see among others Jaffe 1989; Audretsch and Feldman 1996). The concern that now arises is to unravel the mechanisms underlying and explaining the geographical knowledge spillovers. The aim of this special issue is to present the latest new findings on such questions and to identify some new lines of research for future work. Before presenting the content of this special issue, we very briefly review the main results of the empirical literature on the geography of innovation. We also explain the context of this special issue by pointing out some of the limitations faced by this literature and, by stressing the complex dynamic and network dimensions of the observed processes of production and diffusion of knowledge.

Cheng Hsiao’s 1986 first edition of Analysis of Panel Data was practically the first textbook in this very rapidly developing field of the econometric literature; it has been necessary reading and a landmark for 15 years. In spite of the publication of many other good textbooks specifically dedicated to the methods of panel data econometrics (and existing specialized chapters in most general econometric textbooks), his 2003 revised and much expanded second edition will no doubt stay an outstanding competitor and a landmark for more years to come. His present article provides a very good introductory bird-eye view to the whole book, remarkable both by its clarity and concision, and by its depth and focus on most important and specific issues of panel data econometrics. My brief comments here are from the standpoint of an “ap

This paper introduces dynamics in the R&D-to-innovation and innovation-to-productivity relationships, which have mostly been estimated on cross-sectional data. It considers four nonlinear dynamic simultaneous equations models that include individual effects and idiosyncratic errors correlated across equations and that differ in the way innovation enters the conditional mean of labor productivity: through an observed binary indicator, an observed intensity variable or through the continuous latent variables that correspond to the observed occurrence or intensity. It estimates these models by full information maximum likelihood using two unbalanced panels of Dutch and French manufacturing firms from three waves of the Community Innovation Survey. The results provide evidence of robust unidirectional causality from innovation to productivity and of stronger persistence in productivity than in innovation.data source: CIS data

Empirical labor economists have resorted to estimating the responsiveness of workers' wages on firms' ability to pay to assess the extent to which employers share rents with their employees. This paper compares this labor economics approach with two other approaches that rely on standard micro production data only: the productivity approach for which estimates of the output elasticities of labor and materials and data on the respective revenue shares are needed and the accounting approach which boils down to directly computing the extent of rent sharing from firm accounting information. Using matched employer-employee data on 60,294 employees working in 9,849 firms over the period 1984-2001 in France, we quantify industry differences in rent-sharing parameters derived from the three approaches. We find a median absolute extent of rent sharing of about 0.30 using either the productivity or the accounting approach. Only exploiting firm-level information brings this median rent-sharing parameter down to 0.16 using the labor economics approach. Controlling for unobserved worker ability further reduces the median absolute extent of rent sharing to 0.08. Our analysis makes clear that the three different approaches face important trade-offs. Hence, empirical economists interested in establishing that profits are shared should select the appropriate approach based on the particular research question and on the data at hand.